ZBrush 4 - Sculpts going blocky and pixelated in areas

Black-Tooth

Hi,
I'm new to the world of 3D sculpting and I'm currently following a tutorial based around Simon Blanc's No-More-Wine sculpture and have a question.

My model is quite simple, and in order to get detail in the face I've had to subdivide the model. I'm at 6.725 million active points.

After I've finished my ZSpheres and begin to sculpt, I usually subdevide to start adding in more detail, but areas start to become pixelated or blockey. I've watched several tutorials (ZClassroom) and they don't seem to have this problem.

If I reduce the subdivision my detail dissappears. And I can't seem to subdivide any further for some reason.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm really new to ZBrush and this problem is stopping me advance any further. Does it have something to do with that wire-frame mesh thing? I can post some pictures if it'll help.



Computer specs:

4GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.40GHz CPU
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
Vista

Using ZBrush 4.

cryrid

Depending on your machine, you'll have a maximum number of polygons/vertices available per subtool.

As for the blockiness, it's going to boil down to the topology (wireframe) of the base mesh on the lowest subdivision level; 6 million points might not be enough to sufficiently produce the detail if the majority of those points are being spent inefficiently (which might happen if you tried to sculpt a full face from a sphere, for example). In this case you could use Remesh/Dynamesh to try and get a more unified distribution for the topology, or you could manually retopologize the face (externally with a program like maya/topogun, or internally with zspheres) in order to work in more efficient edgeloops.

A common workflow might be to roughly sculpt out the major/overall form and features of a head, retopologize it, and then continue sculpting in the details. I think this is what is done in Eat3d's intro to zbrush 3.5 dvd.

Joopson

Can you post an example picture? Could be any number of things.

Black-Tooth

Here's three pictures of what I mean. If you look to the left of the curser in the first picture, on the characters lower lip, you'll see where lots of pixels show up and it gets worth the more I add to it.







http://i819.photobucket.com/albums/zz117/Black-Toof/Pixel_Lip.jpg

http://i819.photobucket.com/albums/zz117/Black-Toof/Pixel_Frame.jpg

http://i819.photobucket.com/albums/zz117/Black-Toof/Pixel_Full.jpg

Joopson

Dynamesh it. Because the topology of the mesh is the issue. Poles (where 5 or more edges meet) aren't good for sculpting at all. Dynamesh will fix all of that.

cryrid

He's using V4, not R2.

Remesh will preform a similar function, though I'm not sure how easy it would be with all the appendages. You might also want to try splitting up the mesh to allow for more polygons in the area you're working on. If the head was split from the body for example (which would be easy to hide if he was wearing a jacket), then you'd be able to add more geometry to the head without it having to be spread across the rest of the body.

Edit: Wait, are you also sculpting on a zsphere? I see you have the adaptive skin preview on. In the video you're following, he most likely hit the 'make adaptive skin' button, and then sculpted on that.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUXFfDyR8Vw&feature=related"]Making of No More Wine with Simon Blanc - Part 2 - ZBrush Tutorials ZClassroom.com - YouTube[/ame]