ZBrushCentral

*New Z4 plugin idea*

Hey ZCentral! I’m hard at work in the lab on my current piece and I thought of a sweet ZBrush feature that i would love to use if it existed. I’m on a team at the moment working on a project in ZBrush and Maya that’s only concentrated on the modeling. It occurs to me that my character couldn’t be animated unless she were retopped (which i find very time consuming) and I was thinking about a work flow option that would make creating rig ready sculpts super quick and easy. I thought of a method that would use user dictated polypaint groups to define where deformation would occur later in the pipeline. so say you take a high res model you’ve created and want to make a simple base mesh that you can not only stick your disp maps onto after you’ve projected the details, but that deforms nicely for the riggers and animators in your team. decimation is great for reducing polycount, but it’s not always a clean mesh.

so i though: take your high res original, open the theoretical plug in, and start painting in the groups you want. the points on the mesh at which the color changes would be recognized as joints or areas that will be deformed in some way. then once you have everything painted how you want it you can dial up a resolution and let the plug in create your deformable (and efficient) new base mesh. then it’s projection, UV’s and disp maps and you’ve got a rig ready model :slight_smile: the zsphere retopping option is nice, but anything that can be done in a thousand clicks should be able to be done in 3 :stuck_out_tongue: all of this was just a product of my infinite ability to day dream, but i have a sneaking suspicion that something like this might already exist. i’m still learning the entirety of zbrush, so if you know of anything like this, let me know what you think :slight_smile:

adios!

Hmm… I don´t know if I understood what you meant. It seems to me you want a magic plugin that make all the retopology for you… There are some nice programs for retopo and 3d coat has that autoretopology wizard that is really very cool. Also dr petter said he is working on an algorithm that would help a lot to get a clean topology with very little work. If you want to rig your model based on the polygroups i think thats similar to what poser or DAzstudio does…

what would be much cooler for animation would be be multi resolution morph sculpt in max a la lbrush … but with a single click import from zbrush … you would store morph and all in layers …and then import it , and it would all be there , with multires sculpts … ( animatable morphs that could be linked to any parameters with wire parameter )

I say multi res , because it would be cool to have a very broad level of deformation , like bulging muscles and a very fine one with veins and fold and all …

being able to sculpt corrective morph for skinning would be ace too …

I guess this will remain a dream …

@DeathMetalist:

I think you’re idea is highly possible even right now, it’s not just a dream , it just hasn’t been applied directly in application yet even though I’m confident it can if people put in some time for it.

In fact so long as they extend Zbrush GoZ functionality for import and export animations to and from Zbrush then multires animation should be possible.

In fact multires claymation type animation is already kind of possible with animation features in Zbrush just without traditional keyframing methods (instead keying layers and all)

In my ZAnimator plugin which i had been developing but put on hold for a while, already it’s possible to make claymation animations on multiple res, so that you sculpt then key then sculpt again then key again but on whatever res you want and for any frame on timeline you choose. I’ve since been waiting for the GoZ SDK so that i can maybe find a way to import animations from external apps into Zbrush, then cure and enhance the loaded lowres animation by sculpting muscle bulges deformations etc, at lower res and higher res and then re-exporting the animation at any res you choose, or possibly even with animated displacement map. If the GoZ support is provided then this is possible, we’ll just wait and see.

that kind of thing … would be like … you remember when zbrush introduced sculpting and it slowly changed what we thought were acceptable level of details and took it to a whole new level … well it would give the same feeling for animation … waiting for that day to come …

looking back at pre zbrush 3D … it seems like a totally different era …

go darukin … hope you and others will make it happen … maybe you could see with the gomax guys so you have a complete package to animate in multires and export ready to use model + animation straight into another package …

until that day … good old zbrush is still an incredible sculpting package …

autoretopo like in 3d Coat