ZBrush High Poly Character Projection for Interior Mouth and Eyes

ChristheLancer97

Hello,

This is my first time retopologizing a character from High to Low Poly, so I wanted to know what the best approach is to project high-res character to a low poly one with an added interior mouth and eyes.

I've tried several things, such as masking the lips and eyes off where I don't want any projection. Unfortunately that didn't work as well as I'd hoped as those specific parts became messed up, but nevertheless not as bad as without masking.

I've also tried to detach the interiors into different subtools so that I can project the parts I want to more accurately. But I still don't get the proper results:


tl;dr version: I'm basically wanting to know what other methods people use to get an efficient result with Project All when they create the interior mouth and eye bags in their 3D editing software without having sculpted those parts initially.

My last resort idea is to basically go with option 2 and detach the eye/mouth bags and weld it again after projecting, and then sculpting over the messier bits again.. Thanks for listening.

Alex_J

open the mouth up a bit. you can close it later.  for baking it is useful to have the lips not touching, even if it looks unrealistic. You can adjust them after baking to a rest position.

also check out morph targets and blendshapes. once you know how they work they'll come in handy sometimes for this sort of thing.

goekbenjamin

What I did was, in ZBrush add a layer open the mouth, used that to retopo and bake, later you can close the mouth on the lowpoly.
Would be interested in how others handle that

CheeseOnToast

Pretty much exactly what I do. Depending on the fidelity of the final mesh, you may want to half-close the upper eyelid too for baking purposes.

ChristheLancer97

Thanks for the helpful replies! The problem here is that I sculpted this from a Dynamesh Sphere, so I can't open the mouth up slightly for projection. But from what I've gathered here, I'll have to go back to the high poly and rip a small hole in between the lips to avoid merging them when Projecting. Then I'll try to reassemble the retopo'd mesh to match the latest version.

This is my first time doing High to Low, as I've always done the opposite, but its interesting with what you have to consider doing this workflow. I'll update this post as soon as I've tried this out.

ChristheLancer97

I've managed to find a fairly good solution for this, which requires masking and a bit of trial and erroring. First off, I seperated the lower and upper lip slightly as previously suggested, in Blender. Then imported this back into ZBrush. Now I masked off the most problematic parts where the geometry intersections happen and then just project all.


I get left with this, which is really great if you've created a low poly mouth bag and not for the higher poly. This ensures you don't get that interior mouth bag messed up or anywhere else. Now I just projected all the remaining 'white' parts, bit by bit using masking, until you get towards the edge of the lips.


Now this is where I had to manually smooth parts out again, I found that the lips look slightly off so I just used inflate to give back some volume. Image above is the end result ^^ This worked out much better for me than other solutions, but I hope this becomes useful to someone else too. Another thing that I could test, and which would probably work much better is create a small hole in between the lips for the high poly and then just do what I did above! Thanks again for those helpful replies above!