ZBrush creating artifacts/noise in areas of the mesh that I'm not working on

AtticusMars

So I've been having this obnoxious problem which I've highlighted in the screenshots below, I'll hide most of the mesh and sculpt on just one area for a while then when I go to work on another section of the model I'll find all of these artifacts all over it. Mostly I get surface noise but on some areas I'll get intense striping around the mesh like in the bottom screenshot.

This results in me having to do a lot of smoothing and re-smoothing of areas over and over to get rid of the most noticeable artifacts.

The striping seems most noticeable when transposing parts of the mesh while working with layers. The example above is an arm that I modeled in A pose then created a layer to move the arms down to the characters sides.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know what the cause is or how I can avoid it?

musashidan

I would definitely say layers are to blame. ZB layers are notoriously broken, and have been for years.  The fact that you are transposing on a recording layer certainly wouldn't be helping. Couldn't you delete/bake your layers, do your transposing, and then continue detailng on a new layer? Or have you created a layer specifically for transposing?

AtticusMars

I wanted to have a non-destructive pose for the arms which is why I chose to do it with a layer, that way I could hide/unhide it. I guess my only real option here is to just not use layers and transpose at the end?

musashidan

What you're attempting is definitely doable as I've used that technique myself for anatomy studies, but as I said ZB layers are a pain in the arse. If rearranging your layer order doesn't work, you could dupe you mesh in the A pose, do your detailing and project that detail back to the transpose layer original.