Replicate and duplicate in 3D

Rob Redman shows you how to save time and effort, with this guide to duplication in ZBrush to achieve the maximum of detail on an object

Save time in ZBrush, with Rob Redman’s help.

Adding detail to an object is a task that most 3D artists want to do, but it can be time consuming and difficult to get right. Luckily, ZBrush has a few tricks up its sleeve and you can add almost endless amounts of detail by creating the detail part and then duplicating it, spreading it in a controllable way across the underlying object. It’s possible, as shown here, to create huge amounts of detail, all with set levels of randomisation, without even having to create a detail mesh. ZBrush can take a preset tool, with a cube as a default (removing another step from the workflow), and then use that as the basis for the clones.

This has scope for many different applications, but the obvious ones are greebles and nurnies, commonly used for such things as space ships, mechanical parts and of course, modelling your own Death Star, which is what we’ll aim at doing here, because it’s a good example that you should be able to follow easily. The Nanomesh tool, which we will use for this article, enables us to use just the simplest of geometry, yet can yield some very pleasing results.