Retopo in Zbrush. Worth using yet?

ChaosEidolon

Ive been doing some reading up on this, and it seems, seeing as its a new feature, it still has a few kinks to work out. What im afraid of is putting a ton of time into it just to find that it ends up with wonky geometry.

Anyone make good use of it yet, or know of any pitfalls i should watch for getting into it?

thx dudes.

East

I haven't experienced any wonky geometry, except when I've done something wrong, which is easy with the unintuitive ZBrush UI. Just be careful, and hit 'A' often to preview your mesh, smoothing it with 2 iterations or so and you'll find those holes that are caused by misplaced vertices.

It's a very, very barebones topology tool, but it's the only one I've used that can handle the kind of sculpts I'm doing. TopoGun and Silo just get bogged down, even at a much lower subdivision level.

Ruz

I had to make sure my meshes had no holes in and then it worked quite well, well enough for me to not have to redo anything anyway:)

Rob Galanakis

Its what the other artists my studio uses to retopo and they haven't had any qualms, though they still polish it up in max.

aniceto

I think it kicks butt... most of the time, but losing your unwrap when you select a topo mesh and the whole scale issue thing makes the retopo workflow in zbrush quite a bitch

fogmann

I used ZB to retopo a couple of heads; it becomes fairly quick once you're used to it, because of how it leaves usually the correct vert selected to continue with next edge so it becomes just click-click-click. I didn't have problems with messy geo so far.

ChaosEidolon

Thanks guys. I spent the night getting over my retopo newbness and am now officially a fan. Very easy to use. I think we'll be friends after all.

Snowfly

Yeah it's pretty much perfect until you start tweaking verts. They just don't stick to the surface. Unless somebody knows something I don't?

East

Beats me, Snowfly. I was looking for something like that as well, but came up with nil. That, along with a soft selection tweak of vertices that stick to surface, would be great. Again, the retopo tools just have the absolute minimum functionality to make it useful.

MoP

Well, "soft selection" can be achieved just by using a bigger brush size.
But yeah it's a bit silly that verts don't follow the surface if you move them. Still, if you turn on "projection" while working, it will automatically fix up the resulting Adaptive Skin mesh to match the original mesh even if your verts aren't 100% accurate, since it projects the position of the old mesh onto the new topology.

ChaosEidolon

Nice, good tip MoP. I was playing with the projection thing before, but using it with the topology stuff gives it a lot more usefulness.

I read somewhere that the verts not snapping thing is a known and that theyre planning on adding some kind of snapping support in the future.