In this video, I'll introduce you to methods we can use inside of ZBrush to create high polygon versions of the battery. So now I'm moving on to the battery pack and the switch. These are features that I could model out using the regular SubD method I've shown already, but I want to show you a different way of getting these features. The first thing I do is I noticed that my switch needs to be a little wider at the top. It needs that little nub cut into it. Especially with what I'm about to do, I need a lot more edges to all of my curves, and I need to fill all the holes to make this a completely full object. I'm going to start by taking these edges and using my Connect tool to give me two segments. Take that face and then I can extrude that in, and get rid of the extra faces on the side. Now I can fill this hole and the one on the other side, and I also need a taper that kind of comes into the top of this switch, that I didn't model in before but looking closer, I can see that it needs. So I use my multi-cut to make these edges. Making a couple adjustments to the overall slope of the switch itself. Let's take these faces on the sides. Use my pivot tool to set my rotation point further back, which lets me set the slope down and do the same thing on the other side. Great. It is starting to line up a lot better with what I see in my reference. I'm going to bring this into ZBrush using DynaMesh polish method. But in order to get that to work, before it comes in, I really need to take all of these curves and add a lot more definition to them. So that means, these ones on the side need to go as well, all these rounded edges. If I leave it too low, I'm going to get weird striation in it and it won't really work. So like I said, before it goes in, I just want to make sure that I'm adding a lot of definition to any of these curving edges. Next thing I want to do is kind of the same thing for the battery pack. I need to fill all these holes and I'm going to get rid of some of these extra edges that I was using to help define where the switch would go. Because instead, I'm going to model a lot of these features inside of ZBrush directly. Let's go into my UV Editing window. I'm going to make a quick temporary UV for this whole object. This isn't going to be my long-term permanent one. This is just a temporary UV that'll help me organize where I want sharp and soft edges inside of ZBrush, to fill this hole as well and make sure that anywhere that I want a sharp edge, I have a UV seam. I'm going to lay them all out. Like I said, the actual ladder itself doesn't really matter, it's just for the purposes of ZBrush will be able to tell where I want hard edges by being able to create groups out of these UVs. Before bringing that out, let's straighten these little edge to line up a little bit. Make sure we delete all the history. Now we take both these objects together, and we're going to triangulate everything. ZBrush will try to triangulate it for us but it's often not as good with N-guns as Maya is. So it's going to be easier if we make it a triangle first, and then we can export this as an OBJ file, which is something that ZBrush will open natively very well. Now we can import this OBJ, wherever it is on our computer. Draw it out into our scene. Now that we have it here, we can separate this into parts. Go split the parts. Okay and now we've separated our battery pack from our switch. So if I hit shift F, I can see a little wire frame version of this model and I can see the triangulation that I've created. What I am going to be doing is using the DynaMesh method. I'm going to be using the DynaMesh system inside of ZBrush to give me enough geometry, that I can smooth this out using some of the Deformation Polish tools. So we come down to geometry and let's set the resolution on DynaMesh. I am trying to start it here, maybe about 700 or so. A pretty high number is what we want though because we want enough definition that when we use this Polish by features here, we can see it creates a nice little creases and it gives us those edge reflection features that we've been looking for. We could have done that using SubD but we see that using this particular method for tricky geometry like this, just a little bit extra work can do this really quickly. Let's do the same thing here but remember we separated everything by UVs. So if we click in poly groups, auto group by UV. You see that it creates a separate poly group for each separate UV shell. What this means is now if we DynaMesh this again, at around 700 or so, that'll keep everything in these same poly groups even after it's been DynaMeshed. So now if we come down to deformation polish by features. We toggle this little button to the open circle, to make it stronger. It'll keep a sharp crease anywhere that there's a separate UV, and so if we pull this a couple times, and then we can use this polish tool. Those sort of general whole surface polish. It sort of smooths everything out, to turn that creased edge a little softer. Now that we have a nice polished surface and we have plenty of geometry to work with, we can start building in that little inset for the actual switch. So I am turning on symmetry here with the X button, which will make sure that everything I do stays symmetrical. So as I draw this across, right about halfway down, it'll repeat it on the other side. Now, I can come down to the masking tab to make some adjustments to this mask. I want sort of rounded corners. But if I keep blurring and then alternatingly sharpening the mask, you can see it'll sort of round out the edges for me. It would be a lot harder to paint out these rounded corners by hand, but by using this blur, sharpen trick we can do it really easily. Now, I click off of the model to invert the selection. We can see that it draws all the way through. So I want to do another masking to get just this area. So the darker area will not be affected and only the lighter area will. Make a few more adjustments, maybe shrink the mask up a little bit, tighten it up around where that button is, and then sharpen it. The softer the mask, the softer the transition will be, the sharper the mask the more of a 90-degree edge it's going to create here. So now go back to the deformation tab and from some of these deformation tools, I'm going to go to inflate. Inflate will push the whole thing along its normal axis. So if I inflate in a negative direction, it's going to create a nice little inset just like this and one of the reasons I chose to do this particular object with ZBrush was this particular shape. This transition of this little bit being pushed in and I need another little cut right here. So with the mask still on, I'm going to just add to it using my Ctrl-drag. Again, with the x-axis on so, it mirrors left and right and then I just Ctrl-Alt-drag to get rid of a block of that. So this way now, with my selection, if I use my move tool here and I invert my selection by Ctrl-clicking off of it, I can just push it backwards along the z or the blue axis. To get that little step to the switch inset. Now, I've dragged my mask out with nothing selected, which will redial and mesh the whole thing and go back and do another little polish just to smooth everything out. So we can see how quickly we can make some of these features that would have taken us a lot longer to model out in the sub d method. Now, I want to build out that little inset on top of the battery pack, and if I go into transform and turn on the x and z symmetry, I can get it functioning in this sort of square pattern here, where I can be working on the same corners all at the same time. So I'm going to go to my mask tool and do a mask rectangle, draw out from the corner that I'd see right about where the straight line should line up. But again, because everything's in symmetry it's going keep it pretty even across on every side. Hitting that set pivot will make sure that it centers my active axes around what I currently see. So it looks good. So I'm going to go to my masking menu, choose mask perfect circle and holding Ctrl and Alt, I can draw out a circle to remove part of this mask. Now, I just blur once, shrink it, sharpen it a little bit just to get enough roundness to some of these edges. Make sure we get rid of the mask on the other side. So just Ctrl-Alt getting rid of that mask, and now I can turn Ctrl-click off of the model to invert it and do an inflate. I'm going to be doing the other features of this battery pack inside of substance painter. I'm just using this to make this particular stage here, just to show you that this is one of the ways we can approach this. We're almost done with this, just going to do a little bit more polishing because again, what I'm looking for is that shine on the edges. This is another reason I like basic material two for this is it really shows me what is going to reflect light. Before we're ready to export this, if you look up at the active and total points, we're looking at 1.2 million up there, and that's a lot more than we're going to need to get all these features. So we're going to use something called the decimation master. So if we go into Z plug-in, we can take a look over here and go to the decimation master tab, and we're going to hit preprocess current. What this is going to do is analyze our mesh, look for curvature, look for flat surfaces, and this way by doing all the preprocessing as a separate step from the actual decimation, we can apply different levels of decimation without having to reprocess it every single time. So this particular step, the pre-process, doesn't actually change anything about the geometry it just sort of analyzes it, and this will take a second. Okay, now that we processed everything here, we're ready to actually apply this decimation. So if we see if we click decimate current, it looks like nothing's happened, but you see the active points have dropped by a lot, and if we Shift-F, we can see how it's changed the geometry on our model. It's reduced a lot of geometry. It's less than a quarter of what it was originally and now we can do the same thing with the little switch. It's a small object, so it will be quicker and so we can see it's reduced that by like again, a fifth of what it was originally. So I'm going to take my sub tool here and now I'm going to merge these down so that they're part of the same object, because I want them all together for my export, and then, I'm going to export that as battery high object and save it. Now back in Maya, I can import that object, which we can see still lines up with our original geometry. Don't forget to name everything so that we understand which one is the battery switch high and which one is the battery pack high. Okay. So that's it for the battery switch and the battery pack. I'll be using the same technique for the body and the rest of the cap here. In the next video, we're going to continue to use this particular method to help us provide some of these high poly edges to some more complicated shapes
