1. #1

    Default Detail Projection

    Hello. This isn't so much a tutorial as much as just a few tips and insights into projecting detail onto a newly retopologized mesh or other base mesh.

    I had a newly retopologized mesh that I wanted to do a project all onto from 15 subtools, so just a quick recap on that before I share a little insight.

    I tend to be willy nilly when creating a character. If I need a piece of something (like a pocket for example) I'll append a 3dcube and work from there. Sometimes I end up with a lot of subtools this way but I find it a good way to get a lot of detail out of zbrush without slowing it down at all.

    So from there I merged all until I got a tool at about 15 million polys, decimated down to around 800k, exported to modo and retopologized there (cuz I love the retopo tools in Modo).

    So anyway, that's where I was at earlier today when the frustration started sinking in. I looked for information on the subject but (as crazy as it sounds) it was a bit tough to really find the info I was looking for. There is a ton of info out there, but nothing really quite fit my situation. The character I was working on had quite a few areas with overlap or close geometry. It's my experience with projection that Zbrush doesn't like this very much at all. + I had the eye area to contend with which is always a tough area for projections. That's probably because I included the eye subtool in the original decimated mesh around which I retopologized, only I didn't include the eyes in the actual retopology, rather modeled in some eye sockets. Same situation with the mouth/teeth, and finally areas between the fingers, where the hand meets up with the cuff, down at the bottom of the pants where it meets with the shoe and there's geometry folding over itself there, and some lapels that were pretty close to the chest area but far enough away that it needed to be modeled instead of just blocked out of the main form. A few other areas as well.

    Thing is, a character is a complex piece of geometry. When projecting, things get in the way and it's not always precise then you get a bunch of exploding polygons and then you pull your hair out and start developing a bald spot.

    So I scoured the web looking for tweaks...Project all doesn't have a ton of settings and in my experience the distance slider doesn't really do all that much for me.

    Obviously this wasn't a case of just using 1 global setting that will tidy everything up, so I took in all the information I was gathering and I developed a workflow that worked quite well for me with only a little bit of touch up sculpting and texturing to do.

    So 1st things first.

    1. Just reproject the mesh on an adequately high subdivision level. This will make obvious the problematic areas.

    2. At this point you can tell what kind of touch up work needs to be done. Sometimes it will be small areas that can be taken care of by masking/polish or only the smooth brush or little things like that. If this is the case then right on. That's awesome.

    3. If your artifacting is a little too extreme for simple smooth and polish, you can use smart resym if you have a more or less symetrical character. For me, I had one lapel that was mostly destroyed, and one that was alright, so I was able to mask out the one that looked good, then smart resym to send that info to the other side. After that a bit of smoothing took care of jaggedies.

    4. If none of that works (which it didn't realy for me. the lapels were find but there were other areas that couldn't be fixed so easily). So what I did here was again merge all my subtools, excluding certain ones that were causing some issues (which fixed a few problems) and then I dynameshed it with project turned on at a really high resolution. Resulting mesh was around 6 million polygons and had all the detail and polypaint information I needed.

    Once dynameshed I found the projection to go a LOT better. My eye and mouth area I kept masked on the dynamesh mesh because no matter what I did those areas just weren't optimal for projection.

    I was really happy with this result. Dymesh isn't always going to be the solution because a lot of time the errors are super simple to tidy up anyway. Regardless, I found this approach gave me the best projection from everything I'd tried all day. It's still not perfect, but the tidying up I'll have to do is limited (haven't gotten there yet).

    -J

  2. #2
    Senior Member Follow User Gallery
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    Nov 2011
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    Austria
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    One thing I do not understand. You are goin to retopologize in modo and than you do a dynamesh in Zbrush? Does that make sense?

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