your quickest organic prototyping workflow for ZBrush?

weee

been fairly new to ZBrush and kept trying all kinds of things in ZBrush from starting with low poly base to zsphere, last night I was trying zsketch and got impressed by how fast and good it can reach for a base model.

what I'm planning to do is to zsketch it up(with dynamesh) until I'm satisfied with the base then use zremesher to refine the mesh and do fine details from there.

now I'm wondering whats you fastest approach for an organic model (say a human or some sort of mammal), in this case, its got to be really quick that you dont need to worry about the topology just sculpt away, thanks!

Stirls

Personally, I'm a huge fan of starting from a sphere, then just continuously dynameshing when I need fixed topo. Could never get a hang of zspheres, too fidgety for my liking.

weee

ok, but using this method will generate a lot of unwanted mesh along the way, for example, how do you get rid of these tiny mesh as shown in the screenshot?

Abidus

That kind of artifact usually comes up when you stretch a surface too thin before you dynamesh it, try using a clay/standard brush with backface masking on and thicken the surface a little before dynameshing. You might need to bump up your dynamesh resolution as well.

As for your question, I'm a fan of zspheres personally, but I also use dynameshing from a sphere sometimes. I don't really use zsketching but I've heard good things about that as well.

weee

as I'm still trying to get along with ZBrush, often time I found myself run into these artifacts, if you do have some how do you get rid of these, I yet to find a handy 'remove mesh' function instead of using del hide through ctrl+shift+select, say, if you have these, how do you remove these mesh in a nicer and cleaner way (if you can)?

iconoplast

As I recall, when I used to get those I could usually tame them with the smooth brush.

gLitterbug

As has been mentioned already, there are multiple ways to get rid of or prevent them. I use various means depending on what works best/quickest in each instance.

If the smooth brush alone won't fix it, try using inflate on it first and then smooth again. Inflate is a great brush for extending your model when working with dynamesh in general.

Del Hidden is actually a really nice and easy way once you customized your UI and have quick access to all buttons you need at once. (I did just recently and it makes a huge difference to workflow. You figure out what you need most over time and save up on all that fiddling with the menus.)
Same goes for backface masking on your brush setting. You can't properly work on thin meshes without that turned on, so put it somewhere easy to hit.

Sometimes I just use clay buildup to push geo over an artifact like that and then re-dynamesh and smooth it down after.

Dynamesh makes it so easy to just go crazy and fix errors along the way, that these days I use the move brush a lot and just pull out awfully distorted geometry and then inflate and re-dynamesh and go from there. There isn't really a magic formula, but it's important that you work with a dynamesh resolution setting that fits what you are trying to do.
Start low for roughing out the main shapes, then gradually increase it once you find that you need more detail. If you go high too early, these artifacts will come up more easily, dynameshing will take longer and bigger shapes will be harder to define than if you keep it low.

As for my workflow, I mainly start from a sphere, or if I have a certain silhouette for a creature in mind already I use zspheres to establish a quick base and continue with dynamesh from that. Mostly with clay buildup, flatten, move, inflate and pinch.

The beauty is that you have so many options and are never really locked into anything and if you try a lot and look at other people work, you will find ways of doing things you haven't considered, but you end up liking a lot.

weee

what if you have some very thin and long tentacles and decided to get rid of these, I've tried several brush they all leave quite a bit artifact, what would you do?

Abidus

Dynamesh doesn't play nice with thin meshes, especially if you are on a low dynamesh resolution. Bump up the resolution until you can play with it without destroying the mesh ever time you remesh.

weee

one thing bothers me particularly at the moment is i yet to find a clean way to remove those tentacles I mentioned above, for now I cut them off using clip and then flat them but sometimes the angle gets dodgy that it wouldn't be easy to use clip tool.

DerekLeBrun

Just Ctrl+Shift hide the unwanted polygon tentacles and then go to Tool>Geometry>Modify Topology>Del Hidden. Then re-dynamesh it and the holes will close with a reasonably flat surface that should be easier to clean up.

weee

and whats the best way to remove this kind of mesh in ZBrush? (i want to remove this bridge part )

JedTheKrampus

I'd use the trim circle brush.

Loucidity

First, I always turn off the smooth function in dynamesh, seems like I wind up losing a tremendous amount of detail. I'll still remesh with dynamesh, but with smooth turned off.

Second thing, cleanliness on mesh structure, I'll use either decimation master, or zremesheer. Have found each has it's advantages and weaknesses. So, i'll keep one handy if that doesn't work, go for the other.

Then I'll keep my resolution high, easiest way to get in trouble with zbrush is not enough polys in the area you're working. Particularly on tentacles and things like that. Turn on the polyframe thing, check out your polys, too distorted, too far apart, you're screwed.

Backface masking definitely your friend.

Artifacts like what have been mentioned? Tried using smooth, a lot of times that's pretty much a joke.

Instead what I'll go for is masking what I dont' like, split masked, close hole, THEN try a smooth, which if that fails, back out and go and try decimation master (I still like it a lot better than zremesher, but then again I don't animate.).

I'll go back and delete the stray tools bit that I've created.

I could go on, but the other thing I have found is that for whatever reason, if I need to apply a "plug" to fill a hole, I'll insert a small mesh / sphere, dynamesh the combination and smooth from there. Have tried dragging holes to gry and close it out, no joy there.

Oh yeah, clay brush class seems to work a lot better for filling in this, but still problematic. There is a "bridge" brush, I've used it, painful but that can work as well.

Enjoy

weee

Loucidity wrote: »

Artifacts like what have been mentioned? Tried using smooth, a lot of times that's pretty much a joke.

Instead what I'll go for is masking what I dont' like, split masked, close hole, THEN try a smooth, which if that fails, back out and go and try decimation master (I still like it a lot better than zremesher, but then again I don't animate.).

Enjoy

thanks for the tips! fill hole sounds like a nice solution, as a side problem with dynamesh though, do you always project all after doing a dynamesh reconstruction to retain all the details while applying the new topology? dynamesh is really nice, but i find its hard to control what you really expect without the need to worry it blurs out your fine detailed sculpture, if you have to use dynamesh to your detailed model, whats your normal workflow, thanks again!