ZBrush, Dynamesh, and Subdivisions, Where did they go?

whyareyoumakin1

So I just discovered Dynameshing this week and i wanted to play with it on a model i had already been working on, but when u activate dynamesh i lose my lower subdivision levels. When I try to reconstruct subdivision levels ZBrush tells me

"reconstruction result: Mesh contains triangles. operation cancelled"

Im a bit new to ZBrush, but i cant get around this problem, am i'm sure i've missed something small but I've hit a bit of a wall and i don't want to lose my precious Sub Division levels. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Orb

Well since Dynamesh it's basicaly a remesh of your tool, a new topology, you obviously lose your subdivisions. Dynamesh is not supposed to be use this way. You need to use Dynamesh at the early stage of your mesh, when you are still blocking the main shapes, stretching the polygons with transpose and move. If you try to use Dynamesh on a finished model, you'll have all your details blurred, because the maximum density of dynamaesh is 1024 (which is enough for the blocking but not enough to merge 2 finished models for example)

pior

That's the way Dynamesh works, by design. It's always a lvl0 dense mesh.

If you are working on a dynameshed model and want some kind of subdivisions, you can do a "remesh" at low resolution to get a new topology, then subdivide that and perform a "project all" to shape this new topology around the forms of the dynameshed version.

If you havent done too many silhouette changes with dynamesh, you can transfer the form of the dynamesh object to your original subdivided object, also with "project all".

If these explanations are not clear I can always make a short video for you.

whyareyoumakin1

Hey Orb and pior, I know its been a while but I just wanted to say thanks for the advice. I was able to get dynamesh to work well for me. I started making a lot of sub tools and found dynamesh was great for individual sub tools.

Re-meshing then projecting worked great for maintaining the detail. (originally i had been trying to get high detail on just one core mesh when i didnt know how to use subtools, which of course was painful and silly all around)

Also (I didn't try it but) i just noticed theres a "project" button next to the dynamesh button that sounds like it would have helped me maintain detail when dynameshing. Again thanks guys my model is progressing, slowly, but progressing.

Thanks again!
Luke

whyareyoumakin1

Hmm, I was thinking about posting this on that "what are you working on" thread but i dont know if its good enough, or competent enough... Any thoughts?

tristamus

LucasAM77 wrote: »

Hmm, I was thinking about posting this on that "what are you working on" thread but i dont know if its good enough, or competent enough... Any thoughts?

It's looking awesome man! Keep going

whyareyoumakin1

Final Thoughts

Its 5 months later and just in case anyone else stumbles across this thread who had a similar issue, pior was on the money here, If you get to a point where you have a high detail model but you need more geometry in one area, dynamesh and project all work great together.

Duplicate your High Poly Model. Take the Duplicate, adjust the resolution slider in the dynamesh menu, then push the dynamesh button. (I set my slider pretty low, around 60 because i wanted my lowest sub division level to have a smaller polycount)

Then make the High Poly original (and only the high poly original) subtool visible by clicking the eyeball next to its name in the subtool drop down menu, select the lower poly dynameshed subtool, and hit project all. Then Subdivide your model and hit project all again. Repeat the Project-All/Subdivide combo until your dynameshed model has the same quality of detail as your high poly.

And tuh-Dah you have a highly detailed model, with sub division levels, and an even distribution of polygons.

(Although now i know what i really wanted to do was separate the head from the body on an entirely separate sub tool, so that I would be able to subdivide and increase the detail work on the facial features without needlessly spreading polygons over blank areas where they wern't being used. Polygon efficiency.)

((And to do that I would use the slice curve brush to make the body and head separate poly groups, then used dynamesh with the "Group" button activated, which would separate my high poly into multiple sub tools based on their poly group.))

Cheers,
Lucas M.

cryrid

I'd probably recommend using Tool: Subtools: (Split) Groups Split instead of dynameshing with groups. The difference is that dynamesh will seek to close every mesh, which can cause an odd looking connection while adding a lot of faces to an area where they wont be seen.

whyareyoumakin1

True.

Although I suppose I am always wary of leaving any kind of holes in the mesh I'm working; and when I get anywhere near a mesh hole in a mesh with a brush, it produces icky effects, so i generally opt for sealing the hole for a bit higher poly-count in ZBrush. Ultimately It doesn't affect the poly-count of the low-poly in max/maya and UDK.

BradMyers82

LucasAM77: Just found this thread and wanted to say the info here saved me a lot of trouble. Thanks a lot man for the updated info!

Sardu

So to get this straight. This is for when you want to increase the subdivision level of your Dynamesh project in order to get more detail correct? I'm running into this issue now where I am looking to push more poly's to get finer details in my piece.

ElleKitty

I mean to just chime in and say, once I got a hold of dynamesh, I dropped the oldstyle subdivisions for good. I gave up some topo control so that I could focus on sculpting, which was the main idea of dynamesh in the first place.

When you try to double your dynamesh resolution, such as from 256 to 512, no smoothing is actually applied. This means that a single polygon, that now got turned into four, will have all foul polygons on the same plane and you will have to modify them in some way before their normals will break different. That's something that I've learned the hard way, but there is no downside to already starting with a high amount of poly.

Use Project in dynamesh if you can. This preserves details, but the remesh is not instantenous then. DISABLE BLUR. This has a default of 2, I dont know if it can be changed, but this destroys details every single time that you remesh. Change it immediately and make sure it stays at zero.

I have found that dynamesh creates excellent lowpoly meshes for lowpoly baking purposes; just tune down your dynamesh resolution and calculate, you will get a medium-low mesh that is mostly quads and a bit of tris. You alternative is decimation master that creates horrible long tris everywhere.

cryrid

I would think that dynamesh for a low poly mesh wouldn't produce ideal results in the majority of cases. There are other alternatives inside of zbrush which I would trust more for that kind of task (zremesher, topology brush, zspheres), and more than a few external alternatives as well.

ElleKitty

Not a fan of zspheres and overall curves, but... oooh, I've just wached Ryan Kingslien speak about it as if he's eaten the most delicious cookie in the world and is describing how it felt.

This is 4.6 right? Still on 4.4 but I'll definitely bother updating soon.

Still dont understand, though, why Ryan himself does not use dynamesh for sculpting by default; maybe habit from older versions. But I havent seen him bothered by stretched polygons as long as it captures the form.

cryrid

(zspheres for retopology, just to be clear)

As for why someone like Ryan would use dynamesh the way they do, dynamesh is really meant to be a basemesh creation tool. If you can create the forms that you want, then there is really no need at that stage to remesh the model or up the resolution. Working with too many vertices can even make it harder to get the shapes you want (resulting in a distinguished lumpy look that is easy to spot), and can make it harder to make larger changes to a mesh afterwards. Personally, if I'm using dynamesh then I keep the resolution smaller and turn it off as soon as I can so that I can take advantage of having different subdivision levels.

You can also see another way he uses dynamesh at

http://www.isculptstuff.com/2012/07/new-maquette-sculpting-workflow-in.html

androsije

Please help! I have a problem with dynamesh, when you activate dynamesh on make me a strange triangles, my model has 370,000 vertex points and more I do not know what the problem is! Somehow I manage to solve the problem at the moment so that the z remesher solve all the work again but when I press the function dynamesh again we crap me all the effort! Please help!!

Irreal

There is nothing incorrect about those polygons. Dynamesh wont' always maintain quad polygons.

cryrid

Use Remesh All if you want all quads.

androsije

Thanks!!!
But i have a another problem more , my symetri is pervect but symetri sculpting is mess up how fix that??
I'm new boy in zbrush

cryrid

Showing your full ui is helpful so that we can see if local sym is on, where the pivot of the mesh is, etc

androsije

There is

AdrianoCarvalho

hi!

AdrianoCarvalho

hi... how i see the image in the post above

http://www.polycount.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=4088&d=1332442747

thanks...

louisa

Thanks! This really helped me too. Wish I'd have known this trick a couple months ago

whyareyoumakin1

To quote a famous scientist: "Good News Everyone!"

There is now a better and simpler way to increase your polygon density in on a model in zbrush. If your working on a skull and want to add folds in the eye brow, for example, do the following: Duplicate the head subtool > select duplicate subtool > go to your lowest sub division level > Delete higher sub. div. levels > mask out the eyebrow area > invert the mask > Hit sub divide. (This will subdivide only the unmasked areas of your model, increasing polygon density in the desired location, but will not give you a new subdivision level because the subtool has a mask applied to it)

Note: You should understand that by doing this you are quadrupling the polygon density ration of the target area. So if the area you intend to "poly-densify" is contains 50,000 polygons, your area is now going to contain 200,000 but the same level of detail is going to exist everywhere else. Carry out this process delicately or you are going to have the inverse of the problem you started with (too high a polydensity in small areas of detail. All life is a balance, right?)


Once you have the desired polygon-density-proportions across the model that you want, do the following: Clear the mask on your new subtool > Make your old subtool visible by clicking the "Eye" Icon in the subtool menu next to the old subtool itself > Have your new subtool selected > hit Project All > Sub Divide the new subtool > Project all > Sub Divide > Project all > Rinse > Repeat > Until your new subtool has the same number of sub division levels as your old sub tool.

**I may have my project process backwards, it could be your supposed to select the high poly sub-tool and make the low poly sub tool visible, not the other way around, I will confirm when I get to a computer that can open ZBrush.**

Wham. Bam. Thank you Ma'am.

Your new Subtool has an increased poly-density in the areas you masked out and the same level of detail and number of sub division levels as your old subtool.

-Cheers ZBrushers

whyareyoumakin1

Edit* Is there really no way to delete a polycount comment?

cryrid

That's actually an older method, and can be made much simpler by using the Freeze Subdivision Levels option.

Clicking it will automatically drop the sculpt down to its lowest subdivision level and will temporarily freeze the higher levels. Mask off and subdivide the areas you need to have more density while in this state. Clicking the freeze button again to toggle it off will then restore the previous levels while doing all the projecting for you. Then you can continue sculpting whatever detail was needed.

whyareyoumakin1

^ Well would you look at that, until now I've never understood how to use that button, even with using the "hold-control" tooltip info. Cool! Thanks cyrid

Barnacles

Great thread. I registered here after reading this. Seems like a cool place.
I am also fairly new to ZB and am finding my way around. Thanks for this.

weee

I've been experimenting with dynamesh, one particular problem is i dont know when to stop dynameshing, i keep blocking until i'm happy with the rough shape then i say byebye to dynamesh and back on normal subdiv process, but what if i want to make some dramatic changes later on, I'll have to dynamesh this again, i can of course use project all to transfer all the details to the new mesh i want to dyanmesh, but once i go ahead with dynamesh, it changes the mesh whatever how high the resolution is, how do you get around with this?

whyareyoumakin1

Hey weee,

It honestly depends a lot on what your model is, how your constructing it, and what your final goal is. Let's assume you've started the model in ZBrush from a single poly sphere. Lets also assume your goal is to complete a single, highly detailed subtool for something like the sculpt of a persons head and your final goal is a high quality ZBrush/Keyshot beauty render. You decide, late in the game after you've already done some detail work, that: "Hey I want to mount demon horns on this guy". This is what I would do:

(Note: Dynames and ZRemesher will not give you a model with well laid out geometry. ZRemesher and Dynamesh are great tools for concepting and creating still sculpts, but if your aim is to create a model for production purposes, expect to spend some time constructing a bullet proof basemodel with properly laid out edge loops in maya or 3ds max.)

First, save a copy of your current ZPR or ZTL File to be safe. Then take model and, at a low subdivision level (to make your life easier), I would start making the massive changes. For example, using the Move Topological brush I would pull out two large horns from the persons forehead. Now after I pulled out the horns I would jump up a sub division level or two and, using the clay buildup and damien standard brushes, do precise shaping of the horns. Once I got the horns into a rough but decent shape and position, I would go up to the highest sub division level and make a duplicate of the current "Demon Man" subtool. Take the duplicate A and Dynamesh it at a high resolution to give the horns an even distribution of polygons, which will eliminate your subdivision levels. I would then take some time to really polish the horns and head to a high level of finish on duplicate A. Once I got duplicate A looking pristine, I would duplicate it again, and take the newly made Duplicate B and dynamesh it at a very low resolution like 8 or 16 to give me a lowest sub division level and your model a low polycount. Then Take Duplicate B and sub divide it, make Duplicate A visible, and hit the project all button to burn the detail of Duplicate A onto Duplicate B. Next Take duplicate B, sub divide it again and project all again, Subdivide, Project All, rinse repeat rinse repeat ect. Doing this will give duplicate B multiple sub division levels to work with, as well as a proper distribution of polygons.

Now if I was going into production I would Export Duplicate B, bring it into maya at the highest sub division level and construct a proper base model with well laid out geometry. Then once i made a badass base model, I would bake Duplicate B onto the new badass base model using transfer maps or xnormals. and Voila!

Hope that helps weee, although, as someone who has needed to make massive changes during the detail phase many times, I recommend doing your best to get your model structure set before moving on to detail work. It's really really ridiculously tempting jump into the detail work on a character before you've locked down the base forms but I promise you it will cause strife and heartache an overwhelming majority of the time. (Some people even make a concept mesh, then build around it a tight, well constructed mesh around the concept mesh and toss the concept mesh)

Cheers
-Lucas M

low_polly

I know this is a super old thread regarding dynamesh "subdivisions" but wanted to point out that even if you don't create subdivisions after you dynamesh you are somehow still able to step between a  "lowest" and "highest" subdivision.  It's weird because I don't know how the second subdivsions got created. Is it the previous dynamesh and the current dynamesh?  Also, the Sdiv slider is not active but you can see the Lower Res and Higher Res buttons alternate when you use Ctrl+ & Ctrl- shortcuts.   Another weird thing is that even though it is actually swapping between a lowest and highest subdivision,  the  active points/polygon count remains unchanged between the two.