Clothing in Zbrush and other questions

Larry

Hello guys, I am learning Zbrush by myself and i would like to ask about a technique I see alot yet dont kinda know how to approach it. 

Say we have a character that is not a single mesh, and there is no body underneath the clothing. So the subtools are clothes head hands feet. How do you create those? Do you split the base mesh into these parts and work from there? Do you extract the geometry from masking(for the clothes), then delete the inside?  Do you create the uvs before you start sculpting a character or after it is finished?


And a question for the enviromental part. Say we make an open area scene, do we build/sculpt the ground and every individual rock, and vegetation? I understand we can use hair techniques for the grass but all the rest?

And how can we bake an extra object onto another one? Lets say a spiral around a cylinder. I want only the cylinder but I want to bake the spiral on it.

Thank you for your time guys, its difficult without a teacher or a mentor to overcome some things that could seem pretty simple... 

musashidan

There are many ways to approach a character model. Yes, starting with a basemesh - be it finished topology or a dynamesh sculpt - is very common as it gives you good proportions to build everything else from. So if you had a naked human, you could extract/duplicate/slice/panel loop/delete unwanted and zremesh/retopologise certain parts to create clothing or whatever/concept sculpt on a duplicate of your basemesh/or a combination of all of the above. There are so many ways to do similar things in ZB. I recommend learning all the techniques and applying them at will based on what you think is best from the experience you gain by using the tools frequently.

kanga

It depends on what you want to use the character for. If it is a ZBrush scene I would start by creating a base mesh for the figure, sculpt that, model clothing over the figure, poly paint the model and assign materials to it. You can delete parts of the body that are hidden to lower the scene count if you want. If you need to do an environment then check out nanomesh for stuff like grass/forest floor, leaves etc.

musashidan

Also, uv unwrap is generally done on your finished production topology but, pipelines/workflows are not as linear these days as they once were and iterations up and down the pipe are the norm.

kanga

Ah musashidan we must have posted at the same time! Yes, you dont necessarily need uvs to texture in ZSrush. You can polypaint each polygon on the model, (polypaint) or use sliders to determine position, scale and orientation of  texture items. By some texture operations you can choose uvs and there is a uv master in ZBrush. I use that when needed, but mostly for noise patterns in ZBrush itself.