Perfecting 3D With ZBrush & Mastering Social Media | Patrick 4D | VFX Podcast #38

Dude people are sharing information online, like I owe it to the community. My name is Patrick Foley or Patrick 4D as people know me in the 3D world, I’ve kind of been able to be super specialised in the food world because I've been so active on social media. Any advice for putting work out onto social media? See it as branding yourself and this is the stuff that's going to get you work. if I’m getting these kind of clients already, and I'm just using this as a hobby. I've got to take this serio

usly. It was forcing me to really be like, Okay, what does this stuff look like? Super close up. It's just proven that being very active on social media kind of pays off and people are watching. Just keep doing it. And then the more you do it, the better you get. Do you accept the challenge? I accept the challenge. Every day I've ever done is ammounted to this point. Do we have a timer? Three, two, one. Let's go. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Patrick. What’s up man. All Good man. Happy Friday. Happy Frida

y to you. You know, I just want to start off by apologising because today I joined the daily session. yeah. I accidentally paused your songs. (That was you bro!?) It was me. That's hilarious. s***. I'm so sorry. Dude, you got to let me know when you’re in there, man. Wait, what's your name on there? It's Jamie Bakewell. Perfect, because Bakewell tart is a cake, and I wonder if you've ever made a Bakewell tart? I don't think so. Maybe it's a British thing? Out of interest. You're not related to M

ick Foley? No. The Wrestler. WWE Wrestler. Mankind. I don't even know that was a thing. I went to school for film and television. People thought I was like related to the Foley artist guy. Yeah, I don't think so. Patrick, thank you and welcome to the VFX process. Many people will already know who you are, of course, especially in the 3D world, I'm sure. But for those who don't know, can you just give us an introduction of who you are and what you do? Yeah, my name is Patrick Foley or Patrick 4D,

as a lot of people know me in the in the 3D world. Most of my workflow is ZBRUSH at this point, so I should technically be like Patrick, underscore, brush or something. (HA! Patrick Brush!) right? Doesn't hit the same. I'm a 3D artist that kind of specialises in photorealistic food in the product space, and I've been doing stuff for clients like shaping up menus, making packaging, you know, the stuff that you'd see on a package. This kind of broken off. Sometimes it looks like photos, but in re

ality it's kind of making the switch to 3D. I've been doing that and I also kind of been able to be super specialised in the food world because I've been so active on social media, primarily Instagram, where I'll make about a reel a day of the process of one of my food creations from start to finish. And I also stream daily on my Discord. So it's just kind of transformed, you know, people that comment things like, this is cool, this is dope to just people that I interact with on a daily basis. A

nd it's kind of been every day something new. It's been fun. Just to let you know, like where we discovered you. Of course, social media. You started out doing a lot of cartoons from your childhood growing up. Really creepy. There's like. Really grotesque. Very grotesque, but very intriguing. And it kind of draws you into kind of like the fine detail. So you're kind of looking at it on your phone like, that’s so disgusting. Just to go back where you started i know you was in film school. How did

it start in 3D world for Patrick 4D? Actually, it started back in film school. You're right. I was a director of photography or going to school for director of photography. I went to SCAD Atlanta. I originally started shooting like these local music videos all the way back in high school. At that time, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't really know, you know, what shots meant something or how to light subjects. I just kind of did what looked good and I was like, this looks cool. I don't k

now why, but it's that's how it is. And by the time I got to college, I was like, this is why that looks good. It's like, the three point lighting. And, you know, I had spent all my money I was making into more camera equipment and lighting equipment, and I was kind of doing that. I was kind of in the rise of the one man band shooters. Midway through college, I got into 3D as a hobby. Cinema 4D was a pretty expensive program, especially back in the day, and I saw it at the editing bays for film,

had them just installed. I don't even know why, but they were on the computers and I was like, Yo, I can start checking this out. And it turned out to be much easier because you didn't have to rent these really crazy, expensive lights. Have people all around lifting them for you, potentially breaking stuff on set. And it was pretty enjoyable. So right off the bat I had a lighting camera composition knowledge. The only thing I didn't know is how to like model textures. So I pretty much started i

n the modeling and texturing game. I wasn't actually doing characters until way later. Like ZBrush was not part of my skill set or any kind of sculpting for the first at least half of my 3D career. It all started with abstract, and that's what attracted me to even trying to do 3D in the first place. Like if I would've known back then that I'd be just making like food right now where stuff that you can actually just take photos that I'd been like, Why is that fun? Like, I was so in tune with the

abstract stuff back in the day, and then I learned ZBrush after I was like, okay, well, there's only so much I can make when I'm bumping to spheres together and like volume modeling and all that. So ZBrush I learned because I kind of ran into a wall. I was like, If I'm going to take anything more than just abstract, I'm going to have to learn this. And then that's where the characters came. And then from the characters I made, I did the series where I was making Cartoon Foods come to life like t

he Krabby Patty Purple Flirt from Jimmy Neutron, the Homer Simpson Donut. And then from that I was like, Ha, these foods actually look tasty. Like, what if I just start making real foods? And that is, that was the natural progression into the 3D food space, which I realised at the time, coincidentally, not a lot of people, if any, were taking that on as their only niche in 3D. It's usually character's assets. VFX it was rarely ever. I'm just doing like photorealistic food as the main thing. So y

eah, yeah. I mean, you're you're known as the digital chef. Do you ever order food just so you can touch it? Because your style, it's got very unique elements that come with the shaders and the textures and things. Where do you get your references from? So I do obviously eat out a lot. I go to restaurants, but I rarely like touch the food, like see what it feels like. It's, it's, it's more I'll take pictures sometimes and I'm like, that's a really dope texture. My main references at this point i

s just my own work because there's again, there's not that many people who focus on just food versus back in the day, I was I was inspired by the people who were doing, you know, the abstract environments. But I think because there's a lack of people to take a lot of reference from these days, it's mainly just like looking at photos of food that I've eaten or just Google images. I'm like, what foods can we combine? That would be really cool. But when I started accompanying these images, they use

d to be just hero shots into like a secondary, really detailed image. It was forcing me to really be like, okay, what does this stuff actually look like? Super close up? So it's just a reflection of how much I've just honed in on food. It's references, references, references. People always talk about, you know, in the creating, especially 3D model or 3D piece. Yeah, a lot of client works like depending on the client, they'll send me like big shipments of food. (Oh Really?) for me to actually hav

e and I’ll be able to look at a really close up. So I've gotten everything from physical things that aren't even out in stores yet sent to me, and I'm able to look at it with like the detail. You know, I've also gotten like really high resolution, like folders of assets from every single type of bun, onion, whatever. And I'm like, wow! And it's like terabytes of storage, just like as reference imagery. So and sometimes there's nothing it's just like a low res photo of just the food. And usually

on the dailies, that's all I get. I'm just like going to Google images drag in like one or two photos. So when they do get to send me the full thing, I'm like, Wow, this is more than I'm used to. Yeah. For anybody that, you know wants to join Patrick's Discord, it's a really fun hangout place. And you do this thing called dailies every morning. So you go in, create a piece of work within a few hours, and then you post it as a Reel and that's your morning. Yeah. Every day starts off wake up, take

a shower, then immediately go downstairs to the coffee spot and get a cold brew. Coffee, somebody we something about coffee. Got to be like the same cold brew every day. And then when I come back to the spot, it's like a mindset thing. Like because I work from home, like, I don't want to make my own coffee. I want to go out and get it so it feels like I'm entering the workforce when I come back up and I got that coffee buzz, then I immediately hit the Discord pretty early, around seven ish AM E

astern. At this point, we have people waiting for me to hop on and the people that are OGs that I consider my friends at this point, I think it's taught me a lot because I never know what I'm going to be making until I hop on the discord. Like I don't have this list of things. It's really like ‘What are we making?’ even like the official ZBrush Live streams that I do for ZBrush I have no idea what I'm making until I like hop on there. So there's no prep. And I think that's like fun and it makes

the audience feel like they're taking part in that too. Alright, what do we make? And a lot of times they're like, Ooh, what if he did this? I'm like, Ooh, that's good. And they're giving me ideas as I'm sculpting. So by the time I post the Reels it's like, I took part in this. Like people feel a very nice connection to the piece that we all kind of crafted together. It's a very informal vibe. There's no like, you know, we're all just shooting the s***, Some people will have like hopped in ther

e and I'm like, what's up, bro? And they're like, I didn't know we were allowed to talk. And I'm like, Dude, it's we're just chillin! So I think some people think that just like a few people that are able to hop in there, but it's, it's really just like anyone can come in and anybody can stream. There's no only one person can stream like some people think only I can stream. And it's just anyone who comes in there can share ideas, talk about whatever they want, and it's always a vibe. So I welcom

e people who join the server to just say what up and also just come hang. That's a really and natural fluid way to kind of create something unique I think, you know, without overthinking and over planning things and being like limited, it's kind of like a really fun playground, really, of you hanging out with people and having their kind of input and that community vibe. It's pretty special, actually, to be honest. In a way, especially in this day and age, where a lot of people work from home or

part time from home and part time commute, it really keeps people on track. And I've had a lot of people reach out to me, said like, dude because you're streaming every day and you have this like network of people that are always in there. Like I feel like more motivated to work by myself every day and like, it feels like it's the closest thing to feeling like you're in like an office environment. Like I would consider these people as close as it get's for me to my coworkers. You mentioned pro

fessional work and clients. Do you see your dailies? Obviously, it's a routine. Do you see them as like a training ground for client work? Yeah, for sure. I think I think I've done so many dailies at this point. Like a daily for me is just picking a new food. And that's why I don't think I've gotten burnt out, because even though I'm making foods every day, they're so different. And not only like the structural, you know, models of them, but the texturing, the lighting, all of them end up being

so different. So they might as well not all be food renders. I just finished a series where I was kind of going around like the globe and making like national dishes from different countries. These are dishes that you wouldn't see in like a normal Western commercial light, all these different sources and flavours merging together. And it's like a different type of thinking about textures. And so you really have to learn to texture these things in a different way. It's like taking the training wh

eels off once the client projects come in because a project comes in and it's like, we want like our cheeseburger just front and center like this. It's like, that's like way more simplistic than the stuff I'm even doing on my on my dailies. So it's kind of prepped me for a point of not only the detail level, but also I've had many different instances where like, clients will hit me up and I'm like, I already made the product for a daily like back in the day. So I like have it obviously, you know

, it's like all these dailies are like optimised for like, you know, to be blown up and high resolution stuff. So I have to rework some of them or just start from scratch. But it's like, I've made this before. It's just proven that posting and being very active on social media kind of pays off and people are watching. The whole social media world. It's essentially a live portfolio. You know, you're you're putting out there, you're being vulnerable, especially I guess earlier on when you're start

ing to put work out. It's always daunting. And I imagine that's where brands have approached you literally on Instagram is where you post things mostly? Yeah, you're right. It's like it's like a live portfolio. If anything, it's better than, you know, the way people used to have to rack up like big PDFs and portfolios and decks like that. Because, you know, with just social media, I can pin the posts that I want people to see more often or highlight things or or even show Reels It's like just a

very easy way of showing the process that can reassure clients that are potentially going to hire you for stuff. But most of the time when a client comes, it's I think most often it'll be like a creative director from an agency that have been following my work for a while. And come time they get a project that fits the bill They're like, I follow this guy that's always posting, this guy! This is like no brainer. It's a really, like, gratifying feeling because at this point it's not like me pitch

ing myself in like, can you do the job? It's like they know you already. Yeah, yeah. It's like, Bro, we've been waiting to work for you man it’s been great, and it's just like such a nice, welcoming environment and everybody's happy. What was it like receiving that first kind of brand deal going from hobbyist? Yeah, it was a pretty I'm trying to think if I had like an initial moment in my head. There are, there are a few that stand out. You know, I did one for Adidas for one of their campaigns.

And then I did some stuff for Crocs for like one of their winter campaigns. And then it was like Microsoft. This is when I was really starting to think about dropping film altogether. If I'm getting these kind of clients already and I'm just using this as a hobby, I got to take this seriously. And I just gradually stopped doing the film stuff because I think at the time I was like, I can do this 3D thing where I'm already using the film principles that I love, but it's just I can do this in the

comfort of my home. It's just everything kind of flowed very naturally. Instagram was the funnel though, always. I remember seeing like years ago when you would see a food advert. The imagery was very clean and there would never be any kind of sauce dropped on the side or crumbs. I think that's pretty standard now, isn't it? Where have things have changed from a very touched a perfect hamburger to a more realistic sauce oozing at the sides? And there's a couple of seeds scattered. We’re going t

o start seeing more of that, especially as stuff becomes like stuff like making this in 3D becomes more apparent because like in in the film world, you're always kind of fighting, taking the crumbs out, making sure there's no fingerprints, making sure everything's as spotless as you can, because as perfect as you could ever make it in real life, it's still going to be miles and miles more imperfect than just making the stuff in 3D. So that's why I'm always trying to make things imperfect. One of

the bigger brands out there, they use the term ‘Flawsome’. So we want it to look like flawed but awesome at the same time. That's why you see things like adding crumbs because it adds to making it more believable than just, you know, if you shoot something, chances are you're going to want to take the crumbs out. It's going to look a little bit dusty because even if you cleared up the image in a live action setting as much as you could, it's still going to look photoreal. What kind of thing do

you like creating the most? Like what kind of food? Honestly, man I love making things that have a mixture of hard surface, but also really soft both in the in the sculpting sense and texturing. So like, for instance, a chocolate bar that's like breaking apart and it's got caramel coming out. It's like you have the hard surface element to that where it needs to be kind of molded and like shipped out from a factory. But also you break into it and you have this really flowing, organic looking cara

mel coming out. So stuff that has a little variation of all of it. I like having that because I need to mess with the lighting. Ooze, highlight is bouncing off of this caramel really nicely. I like that. What is your kind of tricks to get these specific kind of textures? Yeah, well I've different like tips or tricks and tools, depending on like what software I'm in on the texture side. Actually, I don't use any external plugins for ZBrush at all. That's part of the reason why I love ZBrush so mu

ch is because just the barebones program has literally everything you need. Like I know a lot of people use different programs where they get all these third party plug ins and then just like when it comes down to the barebones software, it's like, I don't think they'd be comfortable just using that, ZBrush has. Everything I had ever needed in a in a program. And I've since developed such a good relationship with those guys. They're like the coolest people. So every time I'm out there, I go say

what up to them. And i was at the ZBrush Summit this year doing a workshop. So ZBrush I used for all the sculpting. And I think one of the harder things to do is, you know, when you're breaking off like a chocolate bar or you're bringing something, making those brakes not look just 3D cut. And so I do a lot of like surface noise masking. So when you cut a piece of chocolate in half, usually breaks it into a separate poly group. And so when you isolate that poly group, you can mask it with a nois

e. And then when you mask it with the noise, you just take that break piece and just kind of extruded just a little bit. And when you do that, you get something that looks like a natural break in the bar that mixed with poly groups. You have so much control of what piece of the bar you want to break. And and then on the texturing side, I use Octane built into Cinema 4D. I think just one of those things that I do, I don't have to spend too much time texturing at this point because I have just lik

e this library of like hundreds of different food textures, like I like meat, cheese, even like Oreo and Oreo ice cream stuff that I've made for previous dailies, which is that's another good thing of making dailies Every time I make one, I'm like, I haven't really made this texture before. I just save it to my library. And because it's all procedural, it's like the next time I need an Oreo ice cream, I just slap it on there. Or if I needed to be mint chip, I just like slap the Oreo ice cream on

and make the absorption colour like mint green. Nice. And so I spend 90% of my time in ZBrush so that when I get to these other programs, it only takes me, you know, 30 minutes maybe to like, finalise the whole thing. Do you do any kind of like fluid sims to kind of do like sirups and stuff, or is it all just done by hand? All done by hand. I mean, the most I'll do is like... Its' actually a joke we have in the Discord, I'm like, so afraid of animation and like, simulation. Like it's that's jus

t like, luckily, God forbid, I've been able to be so fine tuned and just static renders boom, even if it looks like it's like sim or like exploding, it's all done by hand and I don't have to worry about animating. You know, sometimes I'll have to optimise scenes for animation for another team to work on it. But a lot of times what I'll do for like drizzles and stuff is all mask it, almost draw on the drizzle and then extrude the mask and then that'll be its own like object. And then I can smooth

it, polish it, export it to cinema. It's its own object. You can have its own poly groups assigned. So if you want part of the mesh to be one texture and part of it to be another, there's just ultimate flexibility. Like I said, this is the process, The VFX Process and everybody's process is different. I imagine you get a lot of messages of people saying, Patrick, you can actually do it like this, and you're always going to get different opinions on how to do it. that's actually the slowest way

to do it. What you can really do is. Yeah, the funniest one I get sometimes it's pretty rarely, but every once in I'll get ‘Bro you could have just taken a photo of your food’ and I'm like, one, that's a compliment. But two, if I were to have a plate of food in front of me, to get it to be the same quality as the render, I'd have to light it. I have to get a camera. I have to order the food or make the food. Either one. And the point is, doing all that, would take me much longer than how fast I'

ve been able to make this stuff at this point. And once it's there, it's there, this food is not going to rot. You know, it's procedural and if it needs to, you need to switch up the way this looks. You just change the seed and it just you have this asset that's always going to be there. So I think in many ways people think it's not practical, but it's the most practical. My brother’s started exploring life photography like a couple of years ago. Nice. If you look on his Instagram, you'll see th

ere's a lot of practical photography products. So he started to do brand kind of protein bars because he's he's into the gym and he works out and things. His work kind of really surprised me actually. And it's incredible if you ask me. And for someone that's like new to it, he was kind of like a bit shy to maybe post something. But now, you know, he's built his confidence up and he puts it out there and it's a very vulnerable space to be in. That really goes onto the imposter syndrome of postin

g in this world. Any advice for people putting work out on social media? Imposter syndrome is something I never had in the 3D world because I went to school for film. I was more stressed about I hope I do this right. I'm going to school for this. And if I, you know, if I'm still not doing the stuff right, I'm going to look like an idiot. And you know, it's not a healthy way of thinking either. But at least in the 3D world, I came in there with the mindset of like, dude, this is me and my main th

ing. Like, so if I suck, who cares? So it gave me almost more courage to post stuff because I'm not I'm not supposed to be good at this. It was just something I was doing for fun. And I think if you can adopt that mindset and that's why I was able to kind of be posting a lot and eventually I moved into my this place or the place before, and that's when I really started to post like my face more and like process. And at the time I remember thinking like, I don't want to be the guy that's like pos

ting like his set up or this. It just comes off like you're bragging. And then I had like this epiphany where I was like, dude there's like people that want to see this stuff and if you can get past the whole, like, I don't want to be seen as someone who is just like showing off or this or that, see it as branding yourself. And this is the stuff that's going to get you work like is Oreo or Pop Tarts bragging by like coming out with ads showing the product. Now nobody thinks like that. It's like

you're just branding your skillset and like the s*** that you do. So as long as you don't get in your head about like, if people don't think it's good, like if you ain't got haters you ain't poppin. So I think you want to have a dialog in the comments. That means you're reaching people. So if you just come with the mindset that that's going to happen regardless, and if it does happen, that means you are targeting the right people. Just keep doing it. And then the more you do it, the better you g

et. What about criticism online? Like what kind of stuff have you ever received? Dude I am so lucky to say that there's been next to no criticism. (Amazing) Especially in the food world, like I've gotten like the main thing was like, okay, maybe a couple of people have been like, you could just take a photo. And I think back when I was doing the characters, there might be a a couple of people are like, if I tried to make like a rapper or sculpt, which humans are so hard, someone may have been l

ike, Dude, this looks nothing like him. Yeah, other than that, like, it's been like a very smooth ride as far as the critique world goes. And that's something that, especially compared to the film world, there's so many more times where like DP’s can come off a little bit like Pampas or, you know, you're on these big sets and people can develop egos. But in the 3D world, i was like dude, people are sharing information online. Like, the only reason I have a career is because people gave out free

YouTube tutorials and that's why at the beginning of my career I was doing a lot more like YouTube stuff and Skillshare stuff because I was like, I owe it to the community. And I guess my version of that now is like discord streaming every day, even though it doesn't seem like I'm doing like tutorials, I'm still making this stuff. People can see the process. Yeah, dude, it's just been like this. I think it's been very smooth. I can't complain. You do workshops, especially like ZBrush Summit and

things like that. Any plans to kind of do more training and selling things like asset packs and things or is that not something that you going towards? I was actually on the asset pack game for a little bit. I have a site that's still up where I'm selling stuff called P4D.store and I have all three of my like HDI Packs that I hand shot like cloud VDB packs, fire smoke and that was a little bit more when I was more of a generalist as far as like learning content. I do have like long term plans to

come out with like a masterclass of some sort, which will be in a good sense, like you take it and you'll be able to make any food you want in 3D. So but the reason why I haven't even started making it and just planning vaguely on it is because I want to make sure I truly mastered this stuff because I don't want to be coming out with this content all the time. And then I'm like, wow, I wish I would have like teach them to do that a different way. Because sometimes I go back. The earliest Skills

hare classes I was using like very old versions of Cinema 4D, I was using the physical render stuff that's obsolete now and I'm like kind of cringe looking at it. So I want to make sure everything's just like, sealed shut. Like, I get it. Also, I'm just, you know, ready to kind of come out with something like that because I think it takes a long time to kind of be that comfortable making everything. I'm starting to get to that point where any food possible. I'm like, Easy, easy, got it. Boom. Bu

t once I get to that point, I'll start making making that. Like you say, you look back at the the ways that you used to do things on like Skillshare and it's kind of obsolete or there's new ways of doing things. So how do you kind of stay on top of or create something that will last in a world where there's new tools coming out all the time to, like, do this for you will automate this, I guess. Is there a sell by date on things like that? Yeah, I think I think it really just comes down to when w

e say what's relevant. If it teaches you to make something pretty fast and and it looks right, then it's relevant to me, at least in the world of creating this kind of content because we live in a day and age where, you know, there's a lot of stuff's more accessible. People are coming out with new this every day. Even these softwares that we use all the time are having new updates all the time. I think if you feel like you need to be at the very top, you know, version of every software, this tec

hnique 24 seven, like you're not going to be happy because you're just is like, I just learned this. Oh a new thing came out. I got to like, relearn and it just doesn't make sense. After a certain point, it's like I was using, you know, a 2021 version of Cinema 4D and Octane like a month ago. And I just now re built this whole system. And part of the reason that was is because I had client projects in which I'm actually sending design files over and with those client projects, when I update the

softwares, the textures don't look the same. And so I was kind of trapped in learning or using old versions of software. I'm now current on every software. You know, I got the new workstation, Everything has been great. Everything is like sped up now. And so, you know, I was able to start building like a huge clientele network and like become a prominent figure in on social media, all with just using old versions of software. So it doesn't matter if you're like the very oldest or the newest or w

hatever. That would be like a mental block If you think you have to be on the very newest version all the time. No that makes sense absolutely. I mean, there's gross-ups and then there's like a Patrick 4D gross-up. Because when you look at it for a while, you kind of just curl up and go, that's so. Yeah, I think that's why it's fun because it's like you look at cartoons, I think a lot of SpongeBob stuff. Thank you for your patronage. SpongeBob had a a style that they would whip out every once in

a while, and it was like these really grotesque, like still frames that were so crazy. Ren & Stimpy springs to mind for me. which I did those guys too. I've seen those. Yeah. Yeah. So any kind of gross up you can imagine, Flapjack, Ren and Stimpy, SpongeBob, like I probably did them all at one point. I think the first character I even tried to make that was like a gross-up It was salad fingers. Even though his face is very simple, it's like an oval and then cut off of the eyes. I was making the

m in a way before Maxon even acquired Pixel Logic or ZBrush They didn't have any sort of remesher. So I could like make these shapes and cut out things, but they would be so dense under the hood. And I was like, you know, even for this very simplistic, salad fingers guy, it just looks, it's hard on my computer making these things. So I had to learn ZBrush and just get into better things like topology and doing stuff that way. Poly group separating textures. There's like a pureness to the way the

y're drawn. So you can't get that level of detail that you can in 3D. It's just like it leaves so much to your imagination. Even when they're trying to portray someone is kind of gross. So they have like a boil and like maybe three hairs sticking out. What does that look like if this guy was in real life? And so when you have the ability to use like displacement maps to really make their skin super acne ridden or really bumpy or really like you can just mess them up, I remember that classic look

of like ruining someone's face. I just use this one image of like this pizza texture that I used as a displacement map for all of them, like, I know, like nobody knew, everyone's like, how do you make these crazy dope? And I'm like, slapping like a medium resolution pizza texture on their face in the displacement channel. And everyone's like, Holy s***. Like, this is crazy. Like, at this point, everything's kind of procedural, but at the time I was just making S*** There was so bad under the ho

od, but it Looked fine, so who cares? You know, as long as people are like wowed and it’s going viral like nobody really cared. I've got a question here for something I wanted to touch on. Like, yeah, you're in the 3D world, you do CG work all the time. Any thoughts on printing them out in 3D painting them having physical versions? I have not seen that. Have you seen that before? Not the physical. Dude, Check this out. I don't want to break anything. Patrick, I apologise. Check this out. oh my g

od Made in ZBrush textured in ZBrush and was actually 3D printed and printed the textures right on the models. You can take all these pieces out like the eyes and stuff and pop them back in, and the tongue is like so grotesque. That is so cool, man. That was this was a fun one. What was the reason for doing that? Was just a bit of fun, Pretty much. That was when I was scheduled to do a workshop at the ZBrush Summit. The guys over at ZBrush Paul Gabory connected me with these guys called Mimaki,

They had this like technology and this is where I'm not even a pro at any of this. I'm just the guy that was making the stuff that's like the Fortnite burger. And we just went through some of my old work and they're like, Ooh, would be so fun if you did one of like these sandwiches or this Fortnite burger with the tongue. And so I just optimised my scene, you know, it's a fully poly painted mesh in Zbrush and it looks like pretty much identical to that. And they were like, Yeah, we can 3D print

this and just project your poly paint onto the mesh. And I didn't even know that was a technology. You can take the bun off and the bun texture is all the way there and like it's really cool. I though is it hand-painted thing? But there's a technology to put textures onto a 3D print. Yeah, not hand-painted. Yeah, it's crazy and it's like heavy. It's got weight to it, which is I was. I could tell yeag, as you pick it up. I couldn't even tell you how they did that. I should have asked more questio

ns when I was there. But, you know, I was doing so much when I was there and they we linked up and then they shipped this back to me. And I was so pumped when I got it. That's cool. Sweet. That is so cool. I think I'm supposed to do more stuff with them and go to their studio up in North Georgia and kind of do more collabs with them. What about your own cereal? A Patrick 4D cereal where all the pieces are kinda like little 4’s and D’s and there’s some marshmallows like the Lucky Charms type, rig

ht? That would be so cool. Sometimes I think back and I'm like, Damn, it's still so early on. Like, I've only been doing this food stuff for like a year and a half. And in that year it's like I've made the connections with like Maxon, ZBrush and all these guys I was doing, like I was doing part of the tour with the design animation tour with the Maxon Guys. This last year, 2023 was like the year where I went from like just online stuff to showing up places like people like knowing me from social

media. And it's still so early on in this game. And I, you know, I got ideas like collabing with real chefs maybe, and doing like, who makes the dish better? Me or the guy who actually makes it or. It's early days. Yeah, dude, this the sky's the limit. Something to wrap up on. I know that you do dailies every day. This is a mini daily, so I apologise if you've done enough dailies and enough work today. This is the test to see if I can actually make stuff or if I'm just using Mid Journey every d

ay. This is why we’ve done it Patrick! There's no pressure and it doesn't need to be rendered. Of course, but it is a logo of ours. The challenge is taking that image that we've got and turn it into some kind of cake or a biscuit or something fun that you can do within 10 minutes. Do you accept the challenge? I accept the challenge and this is every daily I've ever done has ammounted to this point. I don’t know if you've done a ten minute one before, but this is just keep it simple. Have a bit o

f fun. Do we have a timer? We've got a timer here. 3,2,1. Let's go. Okay, so I have an alpha here. It looks like I'm going to drag, let’s go with a plain, turn this up here, I'm actually going to extrude it as a mask. So let's see. Did you do the pen grab Patrick? Sorry. You know, you know the special pen grab! I’m gonna grab the pen, here we go. Yeah, Yeah. BOOM. Wicked nice. Let's go. Sorry. I've just wasted 10 seconds. All right, let's go. Here. Let's grab this Alpha. here just going to kind

of eyeball something like that. Then maybe just boost the mask a little bit. We have the 3D extruded mesh, so I'm trying to think what we need to do. What would be the best. Okay. We have got one minute 40 gone. Okay. Could be worse. Could be worse. Here we go. Looking like a like a snack already. I can imagine. I'm trying to think of like what's. Have you seen those chocolate covered pretzels? Yeah, right. alright I'm going to go, I will go with the pretzel idea, I'm creating a new layer here.

I’ll use this top layer to sprinkle salt. Ohh salty pretzel? So I'm going to go here, re-mesh this to take some of the stuff out. So come time I do redistribute salt on this thing. It's not to dense. We're also going to hide this. So in ZBrush you call this nano mesh. So I'm going to go insert nano mesh poly group all create different like salt flakes and then we're gonna go and randomly distribute these, take the placement off, maybe randomise the size, the rotation. And what's cool about nano

mesh is you can actually edit this mesh on the left while seeing it on the right. So you can like maybe do something like this. so that's a close up of the sprinkles essentially? Yeah. Which is also being randomised by. Cool man. By the other parameter. So when I jump out of this. of course that's so, so cool. When I jump out, we actually have something that looks a little bit more. Yeah, kind of like salt. And the cool thing about this is I can still move the bottom of the mesh without disrupti

ng the salt so I can, like, move this stuff down. The salt is not actually being affected. It's just kind of moving all this stuff down. So we got that. We can hop back over to this other mesh and maybe highlight This is the dope thing about poly groups I can select just this portion and like, grow the selection. yeah. Maybe poly group that, mask it. 5 minutes gone, 5 minutes left and it's looking tasty. And then maybe some drizzle or something. yeah. is that I've seen on the videos where you ju

st literally draw with, with your wacom and it kind of The mass curve pen, so I can just go boom, boom, boom. And the cool thing about this is it sees the height of the mesh and then I can just grow a mask from that. And then when I grow the mask and go sub tool, extract, except polish. you make it look so easy, Patrick. You make it look. And we have some sort of like pretzel here. (Hell, yeah). It's maybe a little bit higher resolution. And then when I take the contrast down, you can get from l

ooks a little bit jagged over there to something that looks really nice and smooth. And then it kind of drizzles just like that. And I'm trying to think what else? Like any. I think we've got our new logo! Little food logo. Yeah. Send us an invoice after this. Patrick. All right. Yeah. So I'm going to mask this part again. Feather the mask. How much time we got? We are. It's 6 minutes. 30 have gone. Okay, perfect. Last thing we have here, this unmasked portion, this new feature and ZBrush 2024.

You can use the maxon noises, which are like just the ZBrush noises So I can mix the noise off and I can take the scale here masked by noise. And then just do like something like that, to get a little bit of texture in the bottom. And I think that should be like for the most part, it got a little bit of stuff going on here. Inflict that together. It's kind of collapsed This this stuff here. Oops. you know, your beans, it’s wizardry. This is unfolding before our eyes. This is. Every day, every ev

ery day doing this stuff. You get so used to it. And the cool thing about once you collapse these salt particles, when you can use the some like the move topology tool, you can actually move them individually without distorting them at all. You can just move them, you know, i don’t like this one. You can move this here and then you have all that there. Does that snap to surface? Yeah, I think there's there's ways you can snap to sefance, This one is not specifically you can just kind of move it,

move it across. But there's ways in like using curves that you can, smack this stuff to the surface for sure. And I think that's it! (awesome) It's 8 minutes and 15 seconds, up. There's a question. When he's done, done? When's the icing on the cake? My, my version I've done is just I think about like, what is the Instagram frame going to be? And like, is the average person going to be able to say, that looks fake or whatever? And if they can't, I'm done. I did my work and I don’t spent too much

time kind of overthinking that stuff. Yeah, Yeah. How much time are we done? I'm just gonna make a plate! Okay, we'll do circle. Okay. We've got one minute. 15 left. Easy. There you go. You go. Boom. Do you not have a library of Patrick's plates that exist in a cupboard somewhere that you? You’d think i would, but, dude, I have this weird thing where I feel like I'm cheating if I don't remake everything from scratch. Other than that, you know, the textures and then finessing from there. But lik

e, at least with the models, I got to make them from scratch. Nice. Maybe something like. Your favorite type of plate to model Patrick. Go. Bowls are fun, I think. I think a good Ramen Bowl’s good. You've got 15 seconds left, countdown! ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Patrick, Wacom Pen down. That is the complete task. Xenselabs Pen! Okay. I recently switched over. Nice shoutout. That was so fun and I hope you enjoyed it. We have got a very quick couple of images that

you need to tell us. Is it a 3D render or is it a photo of a cake? Okay, here we go. First one. Okay. Okay. This is tough. I think. I think real real. It is cake it. Correct. Patrick, Next one is is it a cake or is it a fake? Fake you’re saying fake. Yeah, that is fake. The next one, is it cake or is it a fake Fake? It is indeed fake. Absolutely. To me, it was the drizzles on the side. But yeah, something with the even the floor. That is fake. Indeed. And the next one, is it a cake or is it a fa

ke cake. That is cake. The next one is is it a cake or is it a fake? It's like mid journey. It's fake. Fake. It is fake. Yeah, it is very it does look very MidJourney. Number six is is it real or is it even if that is cake, you know your cake. And the next one is is it a cake or is it a fake? That's real. That is indeed cake. Patrick, you good man! Of course. I was expecting nothing less. That is number seven. Number eight is a cake. Or is it a fake? That's it, real In fact, that's a fake. That'

s fake. That's fake. Yeah. That's good. Number nine is is it a cake or is it a fake? That's cake. That is cake. We got one left. Is a cake or is it a fake? Fake That is fake. It's something about strawberry. You can tell the difference there on the strawberries compared to the real ones. There's a lot of detail going on in a real strawberry. Cake in the cake, texture in the middle. It's a little bit like carpet, but they're getting close man! it's hard to nail food. So it's like these are good.

Patrick, just wanna say that was hella fun and I could literally hang out which I will be I'll be in the dailies. Yeah, man. Please keep pulling up. I won't pause the music again. I'm sorry, and I'll get involved. Okay? Thanks for having me. This is great. It was. It was really fun. Like chopping it up and getting to be on this. Like, it's always fun to be able to talk about, like, the history and where I'm headed and just other other stuff about what people are doing and even fun activities lik

e that. It was first time I did like a game like that. That was really fun Awesome. Well, thanks Patrick. I'm really glad you enjoyed it talking about the future anything going on that you any news anything that you want to tell us before we jump off? Anything going on? Any news? Let's see. Yeah. I mean this year be be ready and on the lookout for stuff to be like on the store shelves, which, you know, everything that I can post. It'll be on my Instagram and just stuff that you can look out for

and different stores and I got a few projects that are are dropping soon, which that's a new way for me just being it usually it's digital being a 3D artist, but to have this stuff actually on brand shelves is awesome. Master class news will be, you know, that's, that's a long term thing so I can't promise that very soon but you will hear about it any news or updates that'll be on my IG For anybody doesn't know, if they've been living under a rock in 3D world. We'll put all the handles and all t

hat stuff. Of course you've got a massive following and i just want to say Thank you. That's been an absolute pleasure Patrick really great to meet you and we'll we'll catch up soon. Likewise. Man, I appreciate it. Thank you. Take it easy. Bye Patrick and Steve say goodbye The GOAT! Easy Man bye Patrick