An easy-silly way to fill Holes and add Geometry without loosing SDiv-Levels

[John Strieder]

easThat's a very long Title ;-)

I had two Weeks ago the case that i did a sculpt and after the most Work was done i saw a Hole in the Mesh cause of some unwelded Points.
I did some searching on ZBrushCentral and found only very complicated Ways to solve this (including Retopo and so on), but then I found an easy way for me.

What you need besides ZBrush is a 3D-Application like Blender, Maya or whatever you have.

The trick is to reinvite the highest SDiv-Level with Displacement in ZBrush.

Step-by-Step:

1. Go to SDiv-Level 1.
2. Klick Tool/Texture/AUV-Tiles
3. export the Mesh as .OBJ
4. Set Tool/Displacement/DPRes to 4096
5. Klick Tool/Displacmenet/Create DispMap

6. Open the .OBJ-File in your 3D-App
7. Weld the Points, fill Holes or add Geometry
8. Only If you want: Mark the new Polys, go to the UV-Editing Section of your 3D-App and move them out of the Texture or place them small in an unused Space of the UV-Map. If you do this, the new Geometry will not be crumpled after this Procedure.
9. Save it

10. Import the saved .OBJ to ZBrush
11. Go to the desired highest SDiv-Level. Now we apply the Disp-Map:
12. Choose the in Step 5 generated Disp-Map in the Alpha-Palette
13. Go to Tool/Displacement/Intensity and set it to 1.6
14. Klick on Tool/Displacement/Apply DispMap
15. Et voilà - we have our sculpting again, with the fixed/added Geeomtry.

I hope, this is useful for someone :-)

[spaceboy412]

as i'm sure this will help some people i don't see how this is less complicated than doing the retop, esp for holes, it could take less than 5min.

[John Strieder]

esp for holes, it could take less than 5min.Hi :-) Do you have a Link to a description of this? As i wrote above, as i had the Problem i didn't find any easy way here. Is it possible to edit the Topology without loosing the higher SDiv-Levels?
But, 5 Minutes are a little bit long time too ...

[vincenzi]

i export the lowest subd level, fix it in maya and reimport it in Zbrush as a separate tool. I make my fixed mesh a subtool of the sculpted tool with bad mesh, and use the project All feature that shrink wraps the smoothed fixed mesh. The only drawback is that it can't handle faces that are close together so for example when shrink wrapping a face it's better for the mouth to be open rather than closed.

I will look into your technique. I think fixing the mesh after sculpting the high res version is a crucial step in the workflow because it's hard to predict the exact topology of the sculpted model. Pixologic should look into perfecting and adding features that allow this.

[Rastaman]

John, this is very helpfull if it works.:tu:

I will check your technique soon.
Although the retopo-way I described is suitable in most situations, it often lacks when a model has open holes like the eyes and mouth etc..
Then the normal retopo-projection-way for closing the holes or changing the geometry and project the old details leads to wired results because ZBrush seems to loose the connection at the hole-borders and calculates trash.

So, your way could be a solution for this.
I will try it and have added your suggestions to the appendix of my own working version of my retopo-tutorial as well as a link from my thread to yours.
Thanks for the tip.

Grüsse,
Ralf