Zbrush - Best Way to Pose FInished Character Designs

Joshuagilbreath

Hello all! I would love to know some of the best practices for posing finished character designs in Zbrush.

 I have tried using T-Pose Mesh in the past with varying success. My main frustration points with the T-Pose mesh process is the laggy response rate, and severely deformed geometry occurring so quickly. I wouldn't mind exporting my models to another piece of software like Daz or Keyshot to more easily pose the model and gear, but I just don't know what the best course of action is.

 I would also like to start using Marvelous Designer to cloth my models, and I know what will add another level of complexity so I would like to account for that.

My main desire is to pose a clothed, modeled character for illustrations, and have the flexibility to pose them relatively freely.

Mixamo seem like an interesting method to achieve this but don't really want to be bound to having a production optimized model.

Any advise on the subject would be much appreciated! Thank you!

shark2003

So basically you have to pose a low res mesh.
Your sculpt should have multiple levels on subdivisions, not dynamesh.
This could be achieved easily with a zremesher and reprojection.
So it goes this way.

Duplicate your highres mesh. Hide it. Apply zremesher to your copy and subdivide it a couple of times. unhide the highres mesh and hide everything else. And then use proyect to re apply the details. 
Do this with everysubtool. By the end you should have multiple subtools with lots of detail and everyone of them with muttiple subdivisions.
When you do the T-pose mesh thingy, it will grab all your lower subdivisions, then when you go back it will apply the pose and no sculpt detail will be lose. Of course you'll have to re sculpt some areas.

If you want to try marvelous on that, try creating a layer for the pose. So you can animate it?? I dont know men, I dont do marvelous ... yet.

Good luck

Joshuagilbreath

shark2003 said:

So basically you have to pose a low res mesh.
Your sculpt should have multiple levels on subdivisions, not dynamesh.
This could be achieved easily with a zremesher and reprojection.
So it goes this way.

Duplicate your highres mesh. Hide it. Apply zremesher to your copy and subdivide it a couple of times. unhide the highres mesh and hide everything else. And then use proyect to re apply the details. 
Do this with everysubtool. By the end you should have multiple subtools with lots of detail and everyone of them with muttiple subdivisions.
When you do the T-pose mesh thingy, it will grab all your lower subdivisions, then when you go back it will apply the pose and no sculpt detail will be lose. Of course you'll have to re sculpt some areas.

If you want to try marvelous on that, try creating a layer for the pose. So you can animate it?? I dont know men, I dont do marvelous ... yet.

Good luck

Thanks for the reply shark2003! The reprojection process makes since, much appreciated.

FYI I have been browsing the Marvelous Designer forums and found one important bit of info when designing your clothing, don't design it around a T pose. Use a character that is in a A pose instead. One of the great benefits of Marvelous Designer is that you can simulate gravity and wind on your clothing. When using a T pose, there are a lot of issues that can occur with fabric bunching up around the neckline and laying correctly under the arms when a character is sitting in a T pose. Hope the tidbit help in the future.

Thanks again, appreciate the insight!

Joshuagilbreath

For anyone else interested, I ran across this tutorial, concerning my exact question about Marvelous Design and ZBrush Workflow.

Can't wait to dig in! - https://gumroad.com/l/qSvvs