Zbrush: Creasing
polycounter lvl 11
Hey all,
In this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63652
poir advocated for the use of creasing in Zbrush. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get any useful results from them.
Does anyone actually use creasing in their Zbrush workflow, and, if so, how?
It seams like they might be useful if you are trying to get just a FEW sharp tangents on a generally smooth or streamlined mesh.
but for somthing like this rock (test mesh), it just doesn't seam to make any practical sense...
It seams far more practical to just turn SMT off and smooth out the faceting that results when you divide your geo, or just use the resmesh and project at each division level to get a nice (even quad) mesh that still captures your sharp tangents.
That said I didn't want to abandon a potentially useful tool before inquiring here. Am I missing somthing, or is this a pretty good conclusion?
In this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63652
poir advocated for the use of creasing in Zbrush. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get any useful results from them.
Does anyone actually use creasing in their Zbrush workflow, and, if so, how?
It seams like they might be useful if you are trying to get just a FEW sharp tangents on a generally smooth or streamlined mesh.
but for somthing like this rock (test mesh), it just doesn't seam to make any practical sense...
It seams far more practical to just turn SMT off and smooth out the faceting that results when you divide your geo, or just use the resmesh and project at each division level to get a nice (even quad) mesh that still captures your sharp tangents.
That said I didn't want to abandon a potentially useful tool before inquiring here. Am I missing somthing, or is this a pretty good conclusion?
Replies
You can also use creasing settings from maya, but you have to import a .ma file for that to work.
It's really great to send in simple base-meshes for hard-surface objects, without having to mess about with extra edge-loops or tweak stuff in Zbrush, just works directly, and you can control it with the creaselevel slider in the Geometry tab.
It's much more powerful than turning SMT off, as you can just subdivide like usual and the creases will only appear where you told them too in Maya.
Maya is still a bit finicky with creasing, sometimes some stuff doesn't work so well, but once you know what causes problems, and have set up a few shortcuts, it's quite nice to use.
I haven't looked into if this kind of workflow is possible in 3dsMax though, would be curious to know if it is.
With this I am able to use auto smooth on a lower poly mesh in 3dsmax and then have those hard edges automatically creased when I import.
However, none of its very intuitive. I made need a cleaner base mesh than what I have to get a good sculpt out of things.
I'm wondering if part of the problem is how messy my quads and flow are, I'm still trying to get a feel for what a good base mesh is. I haven't encountered a single person that uses creasing other than pior, and that was an old post, so maybe its just not worth while.
Bal, acording to this post GoZ for max does NOT support it: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=94895&highlight=crease+Goz
This got me results fast that looked reasonably good.
I then imported with the smoothing groups plugin, divided a few times, and then smoothed out any areas I didn't want to be faceted.
Just because it was a rock was no reason to have bad topology, it made all the difference.
Its really nice having a few hard edges here and there that are perfectly crisp like this. They are also all uniform which in my initial sculpt they were kind of a mess.
Maybe that will help someone, the workflow is seaming more intuitive to me now, as usual pior was probably right about this being the best way.
The only other options is to simply use remesh and project up, but then I will have to deal with any imperfections in my initial sculpt (like non-uniform beveling along hard edges), or just divide without smoothing turned on, but then you will have to recapture your curvature along rounded areas of your silhouette by tweaking them with the move brush (not really that big of a deal so that may be a solid way as well).
I'm going to look at that tomorrow before I make my final decision.
Also note: I do not endorse all this work if your rocks can simply be improvised.
This particular one has to match a concept exactly for various reasons so its been a bit of a puzzler to work out. Normally you just would get a rough form and design the rest of it as you go.
There is also a function to create Edge loops to bevel the edges if you do want to crease something in the high res.
That said the creasing workflow I established above takes me about 30 seconds to do. Since all of the decision making about what gets creased and what doesn't is completely automated by 3dsmax's Auto Smooth. Going through and tweaking every single out of place curve may or may not take longer. It just depends on the prop.
Edit:
I just spent a little while longer with a few other options:
1) Setting a morph target that preserves the mesh with faceting (hard edges). Then dividing it with smooth turned on. I was then able to selectively paint back in the hard edges, but really this didn't resolve much because I still had the problems with curvature.
2) I tried using the remesh feature. This sort of works, but creates a really dense mesh that doesn't capture the bevels at all unless you have an incredible amount of geometry. This makes sculpting a pain and counter intuitive. On top of that using the project all feature doesn't work very well on hard edges because the projection collapses in on itself.
Creasing uniformly pulls polygons to form consistent bevels on the entire model which can then be beat up. This is MUCH faster (for me) than going through and defining every single bevel by hand. Any other method results in razer sharp edges, or messy irregular bevels that need to be corrected one way or another.
So yeah creasing, for hard surfaces, appears to be the way to go. Only an issue non-improvised props though that need consistent bevels.
Lately I've been using Maya creasing and GoZ to import edge information, its a fantastic workflow but I have one problem with how I've been using it.
I tend to retain crease info until I've divided a few levels, then remove creases so the edges are a softer bevel.
The issue I'm having is if I notice an error later and have to go back down a few levels to resolve it the crease information is no longer available.
Anyone know if there is any way to store the crease info and only selectively use it when dividing the mesh? Even an alternative to the workflow?
Cheers.
Personally I just use the double subdivision surface technique in Blender where you can easily preview the limit surface after some creasing. Remove the second subsurf and export to Zbrush, rebuild subdivisions and subdivide it a few times again there and bob's your uncle. I haven't run into too many errors that require deleting and remaking all of the subdivision levels.