Making Wormisms with Zif Slick

Inspired by this thread on ZB Central More Wormism - WIP and not likely to be finished (Page 1) More Wormism - WIP and not likely to be finished by Boozy Floozie which uses a tutorial by Pixolator Topic: Tutorial: Morph-Target and UV mapping....

NOTE: You must be using Zif Slick Version 2.0 to follow this tutorial get it here and install it if you haven't got it already.

Using Zif Slick makes this process very simple and after you get a handle on using the script you should be able to add your own flourishes to produce all manner of Worm type objects.

 

First the Basics

Some people might be confused on how you interact with Zspheres using Zif Slick. Using Zbrush you select the Node by clicking on it with the mouse button. While it might be necessary and legal to manipulate the nodes directly Zif Slick uses the 's' key for selection, which we will explore.

First, lets get some Zspheres to putter around with. I assume you have Zif Slick loaded and ready to go. Press the Utility button and observe the button called Make. Pressing Make will create a string of nodes equal to the number you put into the # of Pts slider. You could then make a circle of these nodes by entering the number of degrees and pressing "Circle" but that is for you to play with later.
Select a node by placing the Mouse over it and pressing the 's' key. The object will respond by changing color slightly. Select additional Nodes by moving the mouse to them and pressing the Shift and 's' key in combination. You can keep adding nodes to the selection in this manner. It is IMPORTANT to know that with Zscripts you have to completely let go of the shift or any combination key (Cntrl, Alt etc..) before you can use it again. So. Shift 's', let go of keys, Shift 's'. and so on and so forth.
You can also select a row of sequential nodes using the Cntrl 's' combination. After selecting a node with the 's' key move the mouse to the last nod that you want to select and press Cntrl 's'. This will select all nodes between the two. Remember however as you are adding complexity to your model the nodes may no longer be in sequential order so you may get unexpected results.

Now that you know all that let us move on to making worms. Get rid of your test model, clear the canvas and press the Angle button.

Using the Angle script we can control the placement of nodes by using XYZ angles and distance. The slider RDist is the amount of spacing between each node, this distance is the diameter of the current node. With Zif Slick you control the size of each node by using the Size buttons located in the main menu. These buttons represent the percent of the currently selected node(s) Press +.5 to increase the diameter by 50% or -.25 to decrease by 25%. The Taper button and Tincr slider will increase/decrease the current selected node by the percent amount (Tincr) of the parent. You can move thru your model using the 'f' (forward) and 'b' (back) keys while pressing the Taper button and gradually taper your model larger or smaller depending on the Tincr slider. - minus gets smaller and +plus makes it bigger. So anyhoo, press the New Node button in the Create section and create a starting node and size it if necessary to your liking.

Using the Angle controls I can freely create curves in the XYZ direction using the sliders. By placing values in the Angleincr and/or ZAngleIncr everytime a new node is created it automatically updates the Angle values by that amount. For the curve displayed I started the first node with the value of 90 in the XYAngle, 1 RDist, 0 ZAngle, -10 AngleIncr, and 0 ZAngleIncr. Since I wanted to keep the model in the XY direction I kept the Z values at zero and I also unselected the Za switch to make sure.

All set I start creating the curves by pressing Angle-New, watching the new nodes appear. When I felt it was time I changed the AngleIncr slider from -10 to +10 to start moving the new nodes in a new direction. Using a larger number would create a more severe curve and smaller numbers will make the curve more gradual. Using this technique and incorporating the Zaxis values and increments you can make loops that come back on themselves etc.. Whereever your imagination takes you. But right now I am working on the KISS principle, so by and by you create something that looks like the picture above.

Since we want to make a ribbon type structure we will want to add some more nodes to our model. Press the Utility button and observe the Group Select controls. The Switches Normal and Attractor will determine what type of Nodes you want to select, turn both on to use all nodes. A Skip value of one will select all nodes of the catagory, a value of 2 will select everyother node and so forth.

We want to select all nodes of our "Worm" so we make sure Skip is 1 and since we have no Attractor nodes yet we make sure only Normal is selected. Press Group Select. All nodes are now selected and have probably turned a different color. Tip: Since white is easier for me to see most times I press the Color->Fill button to turn them all back to white or some other color I have selected in the color picker.

I might also suggest that you save the current orientation of your model on the canvas by pressing the Ms (marker save) button. That way as you manuver your object on the canvas in 3D space you can then press the Mr (marker recall) button and return the model to where you had it.

Now that all nodes are selected press the Child->O (out) button. This will create a new node on all the selected nodes in the neg Z direction. Move these nodes out from the model by pressing the Move->O (out) button a few times.
Rotate the model a bit so that you can see and press the Create->Attract button. This will turn all the new nodes into Attractor Spheres

And whoopty doo you have a ribbon of sorts.

To complete the first part of making our "Worm" open the Tool menu and Export this object and name it primertwist. We will use this in a bit as a morph object.

Now the key to Pixolator's tutorial was using a simple object to map the texture and morph it into a more complex object. We are working backwards a bit by creating our complex object first. What we need to do now is to turn our curved ribbon into a straight ribbon.

First, reselect all our Normal nodes by making sure that Normal is selected and Skip is at 1. Press Group Select.

Navigate to the Angle Menu by pressing Angle. We can straighten out our ribbonny model by placing the value 90 in XYAngle and making sure AngleIncr and ZAngleIncr is set to zero. Also since our model was created with a RDist of 1 we make sure that it is also set to 1.

Press Angle-Old. And magically every selected node is placed 90 degrees from eachother at a dist of 1 diameter! Using Angle-Old you can move thru any model and re-angle it by using all the Angle functions such as the AngleIncr sliders. So if you don't like what you see start at the beginning and redo your work.

Now we have to do the same to the Attractor Spheres. You can either go back to the Utility Menu and Group Select with only Attractor switched on or you could select the first Attractor sphere with 's' and select everyone between by Cntrl 's' on the last node. (Since these nodes were created sequentially this will work fine)

To align all the Attactor Spheres, since they were deformed when we straightened out the Normal ones, we set the XYAngle to 0 to orientate the nodes above and set the RDist slider to 5. This will place the nodes 5 diameters above the normal spheres.

Press Angle-Old and magically all Attactors spheres are placed at an Angle of 0 and a distance of 5 diameters above thier parents.

Press the 'a' key and set the density to 4 and here is your simple object.

In the Tool menu Export this object and name it Primersimple

In the Tool menu Import primertwist, the object you created earlier.

In Tool:Modifiers:Morph Target press StoreMT

Using the Texture palette assign an interesting Texture to the object but pay no mind that it appears to be messed up.

 

In the Tools:Inventory press "Import" and select primersimple.obj the object we made earlier.

In the Texture Palette assign the same Texture as you did in the step above

In Tools:Modifiers:Textures select Uvp mapping (other kinds of mapping may be necessary or desirable) and observe the texture correctly wrapped on the object. Use the Hrepeat and Vrepeat if desired to change the appearence of the texture on the object

Now we do the magic. If everything worked out correctly you should see the Tools:modifiers:Deformation:Morph slider is enabled. Set this slider to 100 or anything between to Morph the primersimple.obj to the Morph target you set with the primertwist.obj.

Now that you have Twisted the simple model with the morph target you are not stuck with the original texture now that it is mapped correctly. You can now apply any normal type texture to the model and it will look great!

OK then, please fill the world up with worms.