Combining Head and Body
polycounter lvl 13
Let's say you model a head in Zbrush from a sphere. You put some time into it and it ends up turning out nicely. Now you want to give it a body. How would you go about slapping a body on this guy? Model the body as a separate subtool? If so how do you combine them without losing your detail? Any ideas?
Replies
you could also always create a better mesh or add to the current base mesh and use Tool->subtool->projectAll to project that detail from the original mesh onto the one with the head+body.
This usually works best when you gradually use projectAll on each subdivision level.
Move the body into position and subdivide it (as many times as many SDiv levels you have with the head, they need to match), then clone both meshes, this will snapshot their positions.
Delete the body subtool, so you only see the head. Now use meshinsert and select the cloned body. This will merge them together resulting in one whole mesh. The problem with this is that there will be a seam between the two which makes sculpting in that area <very unpleasant>
Next step would be using retopology in that area and projecting the high details from the head to the new mesh, but I never really played with those tools so I`m not sure if you can get perfect results (getting all the details back) hopefully someone can clarify it for you.
I went ahead and used vik's method, cloning the subtools then using Mesh Insert to combine the two. Once they were combined I just retopologized them. I got a couple anomalies at the seam where they met, but once I re-imported the topologized mesh they smoothed out easily.
This process was a pain in the ass but it was mostly due to my crappy base mesh. I had to screw with the hands at 900,000 polys in max to get the fingers to work properly. But, now it's all back in Zbrush as one piece and a minimal loss of detail. (Exported the topologized mesh at a density of 5 to keep the detail).
Lack of foresight for the lose.