[ZB Learning Blog] Practicing the Basics of Gizmo and ZModeler2

It’s been a little while since the last update, but I’ve been making quiet progress.

The mystery of Live Boolean sometimes working and sometimes not (solved)

Isn’t it kind of hard just to make a gun? Anyway, here’s how far I’ve gotten so far.

Things I struggled with:

• Live Boolean would work or not work depending on the order of subtools.

• There were so many parts that moving them around each time to find the spot where it worked took too long.

Solution:
By sorting them into folders, it became much clearer where to place things so Live Boolean would work correctly.

Challenges:
There are still parts I haven’t fully reproduced, but I want to prioritize learning faster ways to work for now.

On days when I have time, I spend about three hours tinkering, but I still don’t really know at which angles to mask and move the gizmo to get the shapes I want — so I’ll keep at it.

Update:
I spent another hour working on the part I couldn’t get right, and it went well.
Turns out the problem was simply that I didn’t really understand how to make the subtractive part of the Boolean.

This was the part I was supposed to make, but I wasn’t sure how to create it.

When I tried Live Boolean, it subtracted correctly.

Here’s what it looked like before subtraction.

Even with something this simple, thinking through all the “what ifs” is fun — though it eats up time like crazy.

…Anyway, the gun is almost finished, so after that I’ll move on to trying figure sculpting by imitation.

As a result of going through the whole process

I worked for about another three hours following the previous day, and I was able to roughly replicate the gun-making process shown in the tutorial.

Issues I ran into

When copying the grip and trigger guard into separate subtools to work on them, if the grouping wasn’t set up correctly before applying Dynamesh, it would cause problems later.

Solution

Do the polygroups first.

You can select a single polygroup with Ctrl+Shift+click, but if the grouping is a mess, it won’t work properly.
So, first use Alt to select the part you want to regroup and isolate it → then Ctrl+W to assign it a new group.

Apply the same regrouping to any other weirdly grouped parts as well.

Polygroups for the grip — done.

Polygroups for the trigger guard — done.

Get them into this state.
From there, just follow the video and there’s nothing tricky.

If something feels off, turn off Dynamic, move the vertices, or delete any unnecessary normals.

Sometimes pressing ZRemesher would assign polygroups in places you didn’t need, so I merged those back with the groups I wanted.

I realized there are quite a few things you can only really learn by actually trying them.

Anyway, I’ve now finished the gun-making part covered in the released materials, so I’ll move on to the figure sculpting section next.

Finally, here’s a summary image of the step-by-step progress:

From left to right: rough model, shape refined with Live Boolean, then the grip and trigger guard moved to separate subtools and detailed a bit.

Being able to see your progress visually like this is surprisingly fun and motivating.