Question regarding twisting mesh on ZBrush

suwhan

Hi everyone, I'm new to polycount and I don't know if this is the right forum to ask this question, but I'll give it a shot.
I just started trying out ZBrush and I encountered a problem, the mesh on the eyes (eyelids, particularly the upper lid)  is twisted and unclean. I tried to Zremesh multiple times using different settings, but I'm not getting that clean uniform mesh I'm seeing in a lot of professional topographs.

Thanks in advance!

musashidan

Your mesh has a grid topology. What you're seeing on other people's work is facial topology that loosely follows the muscle flow/bone structure of the face/head.

In the case of the eyes it would be concentric spans that follow and mimic the underlying obicularis oculi muscles.

If you sculpt high enough(polycount) on any kind of topology you can get any forms you want, but this requires experience of sculpting.

I highly recommend starting with a very low base mesh if you're just beginning. I have been sculpting in Zbrush for many years and I still stay on a very low res head basemesh for maybe 80% of the sculpt, using mostly move brush and claybuildup at a very low intensity to establish the primary forms first and foremost. This is the most important part of the sculpt as it is the foundation that the secondary and tertiary forms are reliant upon. The mesh you are using is far too high and(as you've discovered) will only end up frustrating you no end as you will have great difficulty with the forms.

This is a sculpt I did a while back:


And this is the process I used. As you can see, the original basemesh is just a blob. The second from the left is where I stay for most of the sculpt, even returning to that level to tweak right into the late stages of detailing. This is the power of using sub-div levels over dynamesh.


And here you can see the eye details. The forms are much easier to achieve because my base topology already has the natural edgeflow in place. I'm not constantly fighting the topology.

Aydhe

Everything what musashidan wrote, + would suggest watching Danny Mac's 60 second tutorial - topology with polygroupit

Alex_J

Start from the zbrush standard male base mesh and forget the dynamesh/zremesher for now. 

suwhan

Thanks for the answer guys! Just curious, how many polys do professionals reach when their model is done?

Alex_J

suwhan said:

Thanks for the answer guys! Just curious, how many polys do professionals reach when their model is done?

Do a forum search of that question. Enough reading for days. It's a standard beginner question to which there isn't one answer but a broad spectrum of considerations.

A very brief answer : for game characters, I've seen pro's go as high as 100k for AAA hero characters, so maybe it might be safe to say, at this point in history, that is about the tops? You can probably work between 10-50k to hit most modern game performance/aestheticc needs.

musashidan

An example is the Drake character from Uncharted 4. Geme-res character: 30K tris. Cinematic character: 60K tris.

Just to clarify on my post up top. My reason for advising you to use a much lower res base mesh to sculpt on had nothing to do with in-game triangle count. It was purely as a method of sculpting.