Question about Zbrush - Updating a high poly sculpt's low poly base?

katvalkyrie

Hi there!
I'm a 3D student, and this is my first time posting anything in the polycount forums, so hopefully this ended up in the appropriate place.

I'm working on a personal project (after taking a really basic class on character modeling that only slightly touched on zbrush), and I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice.

I have a sculpt I've been working on in zbrush that I brought in from a low poly mesh I made in Maya, and over the course of working on it I decided that there were some tweaks I wanted to make to the low poly mesh (just moving some verts around and not changing # of verts, UVs, etc). Is it possible to make changes to that mesh and reimport that to my zbrush project without losing any of the higher poly sculpt work I've done (or the subdivs?). And how would I go about doing that?

All the searching I've done has just shown me baking stuff, which doesn't really answer my question.

Fingus

Yes. If you have the same mesh active and import the modified basemesh you will get the option to reproject high poly detail.

musashidan

Or if just moving verts around, why not do it in ZB?

katvalkyrie

Fingus said:

Yes. If you have the same mesh active and import the modified basemesh you will get the option to reproject high poly detail.

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

musashidan said:

Or if just moving verts around, why not do it in ZB?

Because I'm super new to zbrush, have no idea how to do that, and I'm much more comfortable tweaking it in maya.

kanga

To move verts around in ZBrush just select the move brush. If you are worried about your model just make a duplicate and test out brushes on that. Duplicate is found in the tools pallet.

I dont think its a good idea to uv a low poly blank in another app, and then bring that into ZB for detailing. You can make low poly models in ZB in a number of ways, increase divides and when done, then send the lowpoly to an external app for arranging the uvs when you have finished sculpting.

musashidan

katvalkyrie said:

Fingus said:

Yes. If you have the same mesh active and import the modified basemesh you will get the option to reproject high poly detail.

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

musashidan said:

Or if just moving verts around, why not do it in ZB?

Because I'm super new to zbrush, have no idea how to do that, and I'm much more comfortable tweaking it in maya.

Because you're new? All the more reason to practice in ZB. Using a subdiv levels workflow in ZB is what the software is built around. When sculpting you constantly need to adjust forms and that's where the power of subdiv levels comes into its own. Moving a mesh in and out of ZB to tweak a few verts is madness! There are a multitude of tools for this in ZB: several move brushes, Zmodeler move tools,  transpose line (which is genius), and transpose line with Zmodeler for fine vert control

Getting out of your comfort zone is essential to learning new tools. Just spend a few days practicing. You'll soon wonder how you ever did without it.

kanga

musashidan said:

.........
Getting out of your comfort zone is essential to learning new tools. Just spend a few days practicing. You'll soon wonder how you ever did without it.

Amen!