ZBrush Day 39

Today I finally pulled all the parts together into this little childlike version of my bicycle! I’m really happy I got this far, and feel like I’ve finally submitted ZModeler for good.

Speed Modeling Video

Here’s the speedmodeling video

Notes

To get the bicycle chain, I had to dive a bit deeper into the insertCurveMesh brushes. There’s this bicycleChain insertCurveMesh brush already inside ZBrush, but it looks really shitty. The proportions look completely stretched, so I reverse engineered the brush, and created some new chain blocks.

To get the chain into the right shape, I modeled a helper plane, with the shape of the chainline, then used the border curveFunction. This draws a curve around the border of your object and then it lets me assign my custom chainBrush to it.

At a later stage I might write a bit of a longer explanation about custom insertCurveMesh brushes.

Whats next?

To have finished this bicycle, feels weirdly satisfying, and terrifying at the same time. I’m super happy I have a good grasp of ZModeler now, and moving around the ZBrush interface is second nature now.

However with 6 days left on this challenge, it would be way too easy, for me, to keep modeling hard surface stuff, and just sit it out.

Tomorrow I’ll have to switch from ZModeler back to sculpting things again.