My first character; Trying to clean up the model for a game

Travisty

The model has problems. To put it lightly. And I'm not sure how to fix them.

Here's my front/Back/Side views

https://i.gyazo.com/a76873a227c125c0e335d77d209b0704.png
https://i.gyazo.com/ea0048c0ecaae30d4edaf6ae5a91150c.png
https://i.gyazo.com/ae0b3d0d148d1c52338655888f48eda8.png

Here are my references:
https://i.gyazo.com/0d80d547121fcc9f4e3462503847654c.png

Quick Disclaimer: I didn't want my character to be of the same proportions. Due to gameplay and whatnot the character needed to be taller. Additionally, the character isn't complete as I ran into problems that I'll need to solve before continuing

List of problems with pictures:

1. The hair. I just can't  seem to get it to stop making holes. And close holes no longer fixes it. I imagine that I could InsertCube + Dynamesh to cover them up and then pull from the new model but I'm curious if there's something I'm doing that's just dumb. I extracted from the head, pulled out, and stretched the dynamesh with the move brush. https://i.gyazo.com/542fa947c3870cf597e7d6518c2ae2fc.png

2. Hair Pt 2: Would this be better if I simply had multiple subtools for the hair segments? 

3. My fingers got shrunk. Move tool murders them. How can I un-shrink them while keeping their current proportions? 

https://i.gyazo.com/af8fdf075f03115fbc5862a5afff69ee.png
https://gyazo.com/e9ff5587be6ae43a2fc58de572126eae

4. ^ My cloth got pretty bad. Is there an easier way to do this? My model is somewhat low poly so my mask was pretty bad. Even after dynameshing I just couldn't get the shape right. Is this one of those "Dummy, you should always subdivide a few times, extract, and then delete the new subdivisions" ?

5. I can't get the shape of my boots. At all. https://i.gyazo.com/75929d3ca93aea7b3fd9eb6363b58e1a.png
Like the top of them I mean. Is there a way to do that other than just creating a new subtool and merging it in? Any attempts to "Move" or "Snake Hook" it into existance just kills my topology and gets deleted whenever I Dynamesh or Zremesher.

6. Excuse my super lewd panty shot but uh. Is this a bad thing? The topography looks pretty bad.
https://i.gyazo.com/33e6dd77e5a60ac2c86916d96dbe19f6.png

7. And, finally, how do I properly adjust this mesh for performance? Like if I just delete the feet and lower legs since the model is wearing boots would I need to do anything to the model? Would that be fine in the game (UE4)?

8. Sorry Just remembered something! In Blender I adjusted my Torso Clothing ; I didn't mirror it so I opted to delete half of it in ZBrush and mirror it over. That went terribly. So I selected more than half and mirrored it over. I now have overlapping parts. How do I fix this? I believe it's related to #6 but I wanted to be clear about this one. 

kolayamit

#1. You are having overlapping faces, that's why dynamesh is causing error. Enable double sided faces to check overlaps and enable BackfaceMask under Auto Masking,

kolayamit

#6. You should merge the center vertices and create a center line(edge). Export the model into your 3d package and fix it there or try doing a mirror and weld in Zbrush.

musashidan

I think the majority of your issues just come down to good old fashioned inexperience in Zbrush, and not really being sure of a workflow that you should follow.

You would've been better off creating your basemesh with zspheres, or at least zremeshing all your subtools to a very low res. Trying to work on triangulated topology like you're doing is not ideal at this very early stage. Dynamesh/Zremesh are fantastic tools, and knowing when to use them at various stages comes back to workflow.

You might be better off following a step by step tutorial for creating a game character on something like digital tutors until you understand and establish the process, and then revisit this character.

Travisty

musashidan said:

I think the majority of your issues just come down to good old fashioned inexperience in Zbrush, and not really being sure of a workflow that you should follow.

You would've been better off creating your basemesh with zspheres, or at least zremeshing all your subtools to a very low res. Trying to work on triangulated topology like you're doing is not ideal at this very early stage. Dynamesh/Zremesh are fantastic tools, and knowing when to use them at various stages comes back to workflow.

You might be better off following a step by step tutorial for creating a game character on something like digital tutors until you understand and establish the process, and then revisit this character.

Yeah, I actually got 6 months of Pluralsight; I was following a tutorial which showed how to create a character but due to the video player quitting often and the tutor speaking really quickly I didn't finish it. Plan is to simply watch and continue to take notes, then use the notes instead of trying to follow along. 

For that tutorial the workflow was Zspheres -> Adaptive skin -> Move Tool to adjust the character's proportions -> ???
Before whatever the next steps are we learned how to create a watch using ZModeler and a post with Dynamesh + ZRemesher.

This wasn't my first tutorial and it wasn't anywhere close to my first experience with ZBrush so I got that far by knowing the tools at least somewhat decently (so that I didn't have to pause every 2 seconds, hit play, and half the time see that the page needed to be reloaded, resetting the video to 0:00 And if you skip ahead past the buffer it'll do the same thing so.. frustrating experience).

In this instance I chose to work with primitives as I preferred being able to just outright delete things when I didn't like them and easily replace them. This project was started before the tutorial though; I think I'll finish up the tutorial and then create a merged version of my current model, turn on transparency, and attempt to recreate it using a better workflow. That seems like a better idea considering that the other thing that I'm wanting to do is create a base-model for my characters to be built off of (not built on top of Barbie style but more.. "Here's the proportions now I'm going to build out the head") in order to save time given that my camera distance and perspective doesn't demand detail. 

Travisty

kolayamit said:

#6. You should merge the center vertices and create a center line(edge). Export the model into your 3d package and fix it there or try doing a mirror and weld in Zbrush.

So the original way I attempted to fix this was with ZModeler; using the "Bridge 2 Polygons" setting. This worked for the chest with somewhat alright results. This didn't work well for the hand-cloth bit at all. And for the underwear bits there were lots of overlaps that I couldn't figure out how to solve at the time. I believe a knife tool (or insert edge)  + deleteing and replacing faces would be a proper workflow for that. The reason why I made the post (and why I felt really dumb for #6) is that the back had a line all the way down it of vertices which simply weren't connected. The tool that was supposed to merge them wasn't working until it got to the point that it was damaging my model. 

In the end, I think that it would be easier to remake my clothing than it would be to fix the large amount of overlaps I was seeing. And because I want to remake my model as mentioned above the decision seems pretty clear. 

Travisty

kolayamit said:

#1. You are having overlapping faces, that's why dynamesh is causing error. Enable double sided faces to check overlaps and enable BackfaceMask under Auto Masking,

Ah, thank you. I came across backfacemask via a talk by Josh Singhe (I hope i didn't butcher that xP) way back in 2013 or so. I didn't realize that these holes were actually just faces overlapping and/or facing the wrong direction.