Technical question - female face

tysiu

Hi everyone, I'm new to 3D in general, and for now I'm struggling with workflow and technicality. Kinda moving blindly, without direction.

I'm working on a female face sculpt and have some questions about mesh in Zbrush. I'm using Zremesher, fixing the lines with ZRemesherGuides and then Projecting with subdivisions. But I can't tell if the end result is good.




What makes a good flowing mesh? What errors in mesh to avoid? How to fix any mistakes? Do I just start over with Zremesher again and again? Can I move the obj file to blender and fix some things manually? Is there a polycount that is desirable and when it's too much or too little?

Honestly any kind of hints or links to articles would help greatly. I've been learning mostly from skillshare and youtube, but apart from showing me step by step what to do, I don't really know WHY to do it that way.

Popol

The topology you've got here is fine for sculpting but not for animation. Forget about Zremesher and retopo it by hand with the tool of your liking. If you don't know what retopology is just search for "face retopology" on Youtube.

Here are some good examples of face topology : http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/FaceTopology

kanga

He, pretty nice link from Popol!

Yeah zremesher is super for straightening out a dynamesh for further sculpting but it isnt really great for producing a final mesh. Really the examples given are a great reference. Is this just practice?

I like the sculpt. Looks pretty good. There seem to be some bumpy bits around the outside eye ridges, ears, back of the head and rear top of the skull. Perhaps dividing the remesh and sculpting will fix that.

tysiu

@Popol
Thank you very much for the link! This is what I needed to look at before doing the mesh. Going to do retopology on the face by hand. I'll post here how it came out.

@kanga
Thank you, it makes me happy that someone actually likes this.
Now I understand that. I thought before, well it's looks cleaner, is that it, that can't be it?
Yup, just a random head to learn how to use Zbrush and navigate in 3D space. I used references for it (technical drawings, photos, other 3d sculpts). It was getting hard to work on it before zremeshing, and I hope now it will be easier to do some details and fixing this ABOMINATION behind the ear. 


I want to clean some of the bumpiness, but I'm afraid I'll go too far and end up with a plastic barbie doll.

kanga

tysiu said:

...I want to clean some of the bumpiness, but I'm afraid I'll go too far and end up with a plastic barbie doll.

I wouldn't worry about the barbie doll look. Texturing will fix that. Its just personal, but I would take care of the lumps (even if they are only minor). Did you sculpt from a dynamesh? Sculpting from a low rez mesh usually started with zsphere is the way to go in the beginning I feel. Here is one I did. Behind the ears is not good but its an idea from low to high.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSYH9NYFoes

Here is a good retopology vid for Blender 2.8. I don't know what 3d app you use but retopology in most of them is a lot quicker for me then zB:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuQzPDs99yM

carvuliero

Why would you even care about topology ? You said it yourself you dont know what you doing so why wasting time at all at current state of most sculpting program topology is completely unnecessary step I suggest you get your priorities in order 

you have few options here :

- to completely ignore topology and work with something like dynamesh

--to use intermediate topology using something like zremesher if for some reason you want to work with subD levels

- to do manual retopo at the end when you happy with your model and you dont plan to change anything anymore

tysiu

@carvuliero
The head is just for testing   I didn't start it with any project in mind at all. Just wanted to learn the tools.
I did do it with dynamesh and then zremeshed it. But I didn't know that manual retopo is a thing, so I want to check how will it work. And yeah those 3 steps are now much clearer for me, and I will definitely do it properly in the future.

@kanga
Wow, that Merlin is super nice. It amazes me, that it's from 2012.
Yeah, I started with a Dynamesh Sphere, but with the dynamesh resolution set kinda low to 40-50, and I slowly increased it as I was sculpting.

I fixed the ear, and smoothed some parts on the face and scalp. (Eyebrows, eyes, hair are placeholders, just to help me visualise her better)



So this was yesterday, and today I tested hand topology in blender, based on FlippedNormals videos. Then I exported it back to Zbrush to see, if subdivisions and project works normally. 
I can't get such a nice flow in blender as I saw on the references, but I tried to keep the loops as much as possible. I also didn't know what to do with the holes in eyesockets, mouth and nose, so I just closed it (in not so pretty way).
Feedback highly appreciated.

kanga

Looks super!

tysiu

post duplicated by accident

tysiu

post duplicated by accident

Dabou Master

Hey there,

As (nearly) everyone I don't know why you want to retopologize (not a verb I think but you understand the meaning) by hand already as you have automatic solutions to do a good job as long as you keep sculpting and don't use it for anything else. The retopology is mandatory in the end wether you want to do animation, real time, or any final product, so starting to do it this early might discourage you as you will have to do it again in the end (if an end there is, you can stil let it as is).

As for the bumpiness of the scalp, everyone is different so we can see very strange heads sometimes and I guess that's not a problem to reproduce their specificity, though if you represent every skull with those unusual bumps it might be a problem in general representation I suppose. It can be a style too, but it must be something you wanted in the very beginning and not a bad habit you took by "learning sculpt with strange heads" when all you wanted was just to sculpt people. I tried to be as understandable as I could but I'm used to fail in this aspect, sorry ^^.

You generally have to go after believability over realism. If everyone tells you (friends or people around you) that something looks weird even if it's totally anatomically correct, sometimes (not always) it's better to try to "correct" those things even if it means being less accurate, CG is not reality, it just tries to simulate it.

There's only one thing that looks strange to me, it's the very bumpy part in the middle of the forehead in the sculpt before retopo, I don't know if the problem is still there after.

For the barbie effect, I wouldn't care too much about it. A sculpt is not a final product (it can be for you, but generally no) so you can always play with textures, shading and lighting to avoid this plastic curse. If you just want to keep it as a sculpt till the end, then you might finish with sculpting all the skin imperfections, slight wrinkles, pores and stuff and you won't need a retopo in the end (and will probably get rid of the doll aspect). If you want to go all the way to a full character, it'll be easier to add all the fine details with textures.

I hope that I brought any kind of answer to your questions ... I hope.

I don't know how to finish with encouragement ...

Cheers ?