Zbrush irregularities

FearMe

Fooling around in zbrush, i've been trying to create some skin wrinkle effects. I've read that for detailed areas, it can be good to mask off the area and increase the polycount (lips, eyes, brows, etc). I'm simply not satisfied with the effect I suppose. It might be as plain as the wrinkles lacking depth, but I don't know honestly. It might end up looking fine after being rendered.

I'd also like to take a shot at skinning and rendering this (cutting off the blobby base of course), but don't know where to start. This is only in zbrush, and I accidently deleted my base So no low poly/playing worth normal maps, unless there is a way to do so.

ScoobyDoofus

Looks to me like you've jumped into your high frequency details too soon. You've got a big lump of a head and your trying to tack wrinkles & hair onto it. You need to sculpt up some of your low & medium frequency details before going into the tiny stuff like hairs & wrinkles.

As for masking off areas and increasing the resolution...those are 2 seperate things as far as I know. I subdivide the whole mesh when I need more detail. I've never divided a portion of the mesh. Masking is absolutely critical to getting a good sculpt however.

FearMe

Thats definitely a fair statement. Walk before you run I guess

Do you know of any resources for low(er) poly sculpting in zbrush? I'm finding starting from the basic polysphere to be somewhat frustrating with zbrushes tool set, lacking the precisiou of other 3d apps, so I pretty much dove right in on this one.

ScoobyDoofus

I am far from the best or most experienced artist on here, but I've been doing a little bit of Zbrushing lately, so these topics are fresh for me.

I'd suggest #1 using the Zbrush Classroom series on the Pixologic website located here:
ZClassroom

Also read & do some tutorials on Zbrush info here:
Zbrush Info Wiki

I would recommend you not think of your 1st rough sculpt as the topology you are necessarily going to have the entire time.
Sculpt up some really rough proportions from zspheres or the sphere primative. Then use the Retopology tools inside ZB to get newer flow that is more tailored for your new sculpt. You can add density wherever you want. Then subdivide and sculpt away!

When doing your eyes,I think it's invaluable to have a pair of Eyeballs as subtools so you can work your face around them.

Your name sounds familiar...I realize you're an old school member who just came back. Any old art you can show me to jog my memory?

Funky Bunnies

true that, as long as you haven't done local subdivision on a collapsed res. ZB can't reconstruct from triangles.

solar

Reconstruct hasn't really worked for me yet, at best I get 1 sub-d level back. Although I have been using sub tools and extract on most of my models, not sure if that makes it work less.

MoP

Reconstruct SubD appears a bit flaky, but then I found that there's something specific you have to do in order to get it working consistently, I can't remember exactly what it is, but I found it over on ZBrushCentral when I ran into problems using Reconstruct SubD.

Sometimes in 3.1, if you do "Delete Lower SubD", then Reconstruct SubD will not work immediately after (like it used to in ZB2) but if you click one other button first, it works again. I think it was either Cloning the mesh or something silly like that.

ironbearxl

If it doesn't work, then you need to enable uv's.

MoP

That's the one, ironbearxl. You have a better memory than me!
Seems kind of silly to not be able to reconstruct subd without UVs though!