zBrush--Dynamesh

Devon M

EDIT:
It would appear I may have posted this in the wrong channel. Sorry about that people, and admins. If possible, please move this thread to the correct channel (I don't think I can...)

ORIGINAL:
Hello everyone. I'm fairly new to the sculpting scene and I had a question about zBrush. 

So I'm sculpting this skull right now. I made the base mesh in Maya, made sure I had all the edge loops in the correct place for when it's smoothed in zBrush, and I started sculpting afterwards around 1 million active points. 

This is a skull decoration that goes on a door. The skull is relatively cubic and not round at all. 

So, when I sculpted some of the edges it appeared that my mesh was quite literally tearing apart at the seams. It was so bizarre. I thought maybe I didn't merge my verts from the base mesh in Maya. So I've spent my whole day trying to fix my model and stop this tearing, but I couldn't do it. 

I found some advice suggesting to use Dynamesh, and that it may solve my problem. So far, it would appear so. I can sculpt the edges and they don't seem to be tearing apart anymore. 

Why is that? And do you generally work in Dynamesh? Or only certain occasions?

Here is a picture before Dynamesh:


Here is a picture after Dynamesh (same location):


Thank you for any advice you can part with me. I'm still learning.

killnpc

Weld the verts there, you have a hole in your base mesh. If that doesn't fix it delete and rebuild the faces in that region. hashtag Maya sucks. :pleased:

Devon M

@killnpc Oh trust me, I've spent all day doing this. There aren't anymore holes like that in the base mesh. This nasty tearing happens along whole edges, and when I check in Maya it's totally fine =/ I initially thought that same thing though. I've spent most of my day optimizing the heck out of the base mesh. There is 100% no holes anywhere. 

The way I made it was as a plane (create polygon tool). From there I made sure it was quads all around. Then I just extruded the faces to create a nice volume of mesh to use in zBrush. Cleanup tool before exporting over.

killnpc

Upload the obj and I'll take a look.

killnpc

Oh, and a couple things; Firstly, you don't have to worry about smoothing groups for a base mesh. Smoothing groups only matter when you've created your lowpoly model that receives the baked maps.

Second, Dynamesh is dark magic. Beautiful dark magic. Before Dynamesh, if you had wanted to make larger changes to a base mesh, say you wanted to add an additional arm, or even a finger, you'd have to remake your base mesh or Zsphere and either start over or transfer what sculpting info you could to the revised base. Some artists still work within these limitations and try and create a basemesh as close to the end result as possible. That was before Dynamesh and the retopology tools we have today. So, in other words, it's great for fleshing out a base mesh's final forms.

Dynamesh essentially generates a replacement mesh, it would fix any pinches or holes in a mesh by overwriting the base mesh at a resolution defined by its setting. It creates a new mesh that's mesh density is evenly distributed across the model. This prevents dense areas of pinched, folded, unused geometry from bloating or bogging down a sculpt's polycount, while adding geo to areas that have been stretched beyond a reasonable fidelity (not enough geo to sculpt with). In most cases, using Dynamesh doesn't matter so long as your sculpt looks great in the end.