Victoria 3 lips locked

[manders]

Hi -

It's necessary when modelling individual morphs for a V3 Poser project using zBrush, to work on the 'No World Transformations' base Victoria 3 model. For instance, doing a hideous witch and wanting to add a wart, you need to add the wart to a pristine Victoria 3 base mesh in zBrush and re-export the head to Poser, where your 'wart' morph will be nicely seperate from all other morphs.

Fine. Trouble with using the base V3 model is in generating lip morphs, because in the base model, the lips collide together in a mouth-shut pose and are effectively inseperable. Cinema4D could select the lower lip (just select a visible polygon and keep pressing 'grow selection')as, no doubt, could Lightwave and various other modellers, but zMorph can't, it seems. Does this mean that creating 'smile' morphs etc in zBrush is impossible?

[aurick]

Although I don't know how V3's mesh grouping is structured, have you tried using ZBrush's partial mesh visibility tools? For example, you can Ctrl+Shift+Click on a group to hide everything but that group. Or if the mesh has been partially hidden already, the same action will hide the group that you click on.

There's more information on this in the Practical Guide, and in the Help browser built into ZBrush.

I think that using partial mesh visibility, you'll be able to hide what you don't want to work on and resolve this issue.

[manders]

Thanks for replying,

I've passed quite a few hours already trying to use Partial Mesh Visibility to resolve the problem, but since zBrush has no 'Grow Selection Contiguously' option and since selection is hampered by being unable to click-select polygons, it's not a workable solution, it seems. The polygon-interlocking is on two curved areas - really nasty!

[aminuts]

try masking the lips, then in tools>masking hide visible you might have to tweek a bit by removing a stray poly the masking picked up but its quicker than hide/selecting the lip area and removing all unwanted polys that way.

[Jeff01]

Just begin the morph in Poser by slightly parting the lips there. Then export as OBJ, and import into ZBrush where it'll now be easier to manipulate the lips separately.

[aurick]

Here's another option:

Load V3's texture template into Photoshop and use it to paint a black and white mask for the area that you wish to isolate. Be sure to follow the lines of the mesh when you do so. Save the resulting black and white image.

In ZBrush, load the model and draw it on the canvas. Enter Edit mode, and load the map that you painted into the Alpha palette. Press Tool>Masking>Alp to apply the alpha as a mask. You will now be able to hide and unhide the unmasked portions of the mesh before proceeding with your sculpting. Since the alpha is applied based on the model's UV coordinates, you will get exactly the mesh visibility that you want.

[manders]

Aurick - that sounds like the answer: thanks so much! :D