Springs are fun and a handy way to add a common mechanical detail.   Zbrush has a built-in spring generator, called the helix primitive.   A little setting of the initialize parameters and we get something like this:

(You did know about the initialize subpallet didn’t you?   If not, load up a few 3D primitives in Zbrush and look down the tools menu for the subpallet with “Initialize”.   Here you can set all sorts of neat starting shapes for your primitives before making them into a polymesh.)

I didn’t make this a polymesh right away, keeping it as a helix primitive.   I’m going to use a little know feature of primitives–col masking.   Also, to give me some more resolution, I divided my spring a couple times by going to the geometry subpallet.   (Yes, you can divide primitives the same as polymeshes!)   

Inside the masking subpallet are some handy features that only work with primitives marked “col”, “row”, and “grid” with a couple mysterious slides marked “sel” and “skip”.   You push any of these buttons on an unmasked primitive, nothing seems to happen and thus many a tyro is frustrated by them.   This is because these buttons selective remove masks, not add them.   (It feels counterintuitive to me too, but this is ZB, after all–which often feels like it was built on “opposite day” at first.)

The sel slider will choose how many adjacent rows or columns of the primitives polygon grid will be selected.   The skip slider will  then decide how many to skip before selecting.   To get a nice box cutout, I’m going to select 3 and skip 4 which will give me a nice alternation.   Now, before I go rushing to pushing the “col” button, I do the all important first step–I hit the “mask all” button on the masking subpallet.  A press of the magic col button and I have a nice ring mask on my spring:

With my plain-jane spring now nicely masked, I can use “inflate” under the deformations subpallet to pull in the unmasked parts to give some additional texture.   A little fiddling, and I have something like this:

Add a couple of creative cylinders, and I have this:

Making perfect circles is pretty important to creating the illusion of mechanical things.  Fortunately there are lots of ways to do this, such as as using round alphas, but did you know you could quickly paint circular displacements right on to any hires geometry?  It’s called radial symmetry and it’s really quite simple to use.   Just click on the “(R)” button on the transform pallet and set the number of copies of your brush you need.   Set it really high (up to 100) and then you can quickly spin-up perfectly circular ridges.  The clay brush will keep these ridges perfectly level.   It’s a pretty easy 1-2-3.

There’s always a lot of discussion about “Can you do mechanical modeling in Zbrush?”  The answer from one camp is “No, the soft modeling orientation of ZB makes it too hard. . . .”  Another camp will say, “But look at the results some guys like Meats Meier can get!”   

The answer, as with lots of things in life, lies somewhere in between.   ZBrush requires you to think about your mechanical models as if you'[re working with clay.   This means that you need to think of your tools as being built up from things that already have structure, like platonic forms of cubes, cylinders, cones, etc.  Often the trick is to start with something that has approximately the  right shape and work to refine from there.  

For example, I wanted to make a curved plate.   I realized the plate was really a segment of a cylinder.   After create a Cylinder from Zbrush’s primitives, I turned it into a polymesh (with the “Make Polymsh3d” button).  Them I hid all the geometry of cylinder other than the curved segment that represented my plate.  Fortunately the edges were going to be roughly square as is ZBrush’s selection 

tool.  With just the mesh I wanted to be the basis for my plate visible, I went to the Subtools sub-pallet of the tools menu, and used the big “Extract” button.  In one step, the visible shape was extracted and given thickness.   (The sliders next to the Extract button will let you play with smoothness and thickness to your liking.)  Even better the front back and the edge of the plate all had new subgroups!  Neat!

For the plate in the illustration, I just used some alphas I had to decorate after subdividing the mesh to a fine detail.  Codeman Studios makes a nice set of Alphas if you’re looking for a profesional set, but there are pleanty to choose from on the web.  For applying the alphas, I used the drag-dot brush and turned on X and Z symmetry as needed.  To ensure my symmetry was good, I used the “S. Pivot” command to set the pivot to the center of the mesh.   (S. Pivot works by hiding everything but central mass of an object and it will move the pivot to the geometric center of what is visible.)