ZBrushCentral

Beginner question on Transpose

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi,
Recently, I bought ZBrush 4R6 and like it very much. I am also glad now to join your community. I am from Germany, so my English might be not correct all the time. Being an absolute rookie, I’d like to post my first question, and certainly there will come more:

I have been importing from Smithmicro Poser a Genesis figure for further improvement. In order to enable me to sulpt at difficult body regions like the armpit or the inside of the limbs, I need to have raised arms/legs and for this purpose I imported a standard pose. The final figure shall have the arms lowered again.

Several video instructions at e.g. YouTube leave the impression that normal transpose is really simple. Everything works out smoothly there. What am I doing wrong when I

    1. try to establish an automatic mask of the arm (Rotate button > dragging the action line with the LMB). The mask is not covering the whole body of the arm as shown in the image on the left.
  2. 2. am masking manually (SHIFT > standard brush > inverting mask) which works perfectly. After rotating with by using the action line the arm is kind of rotating but at the joints all polys have been totally distorted like shown on the right.

I did not subdivide the figure (resolution: 101666 Polys)

Thank you for your help.

Attachments

Transpose.jpg

#2

Hi, and welcome to ZBC. :slight_smile:

I’ve not seen the masking problem you have before so I’m really not sure what’s going wrong. You are just holding Ctrl and dragging the action line?

For the other problem, I think that mostly it is to do with a quite high density mesh. 100K is quite high for using Transpose. It should work OK but it is more difficult to get good results. When you send from Poser do you have an option to send ‘at current resolution’ or something similar (as you do in DAZ Studio). If so, try turning that off to see if it gives you a lower res mesh.

A couple of things you can try:

  1. When masking joints, it is a good idea to blur the mask by holding Ctrl and clicking on the mesh. This softens the masking at the joint area.
  2. The position of the Transpose action line can make quite a difference to the result. Experiment to find what works best.

Finally, if all you want to do is get at a difficult to reach part then you can hide the other parts of the mesh. This is a lot easier than changing the pose of the model! Do it like this:

  1. Switch to Draw mode if necessary.
  2. Hold Ctrl+Shift and click on the large Current Brush thumbnail. Choose SelectLasso from the pop-up.
  3. Still holding Ctrl+Shift start drawing around the part you want to hide. Once you’ve started drawing you can release Ctrl+Shift.
  4. When the part you want to hide is covered over green hold Alt. This will change the color to red. Now release the mouse button and the part will be hidden. (Green = part will be shown and rest hidden; Red = part will be hidden.)
  5. To show the whole mesh again simply Ctrl+Shift+click the background.

HTH,

#3

I tried out many things meanwhile and found out that the reason was the export out of Poser.

  1. problem with the mesh: you have to uncheck “subdivision” in the hierarchy window (last bullet) of Poser during the export. Genesis 2 comes with a separate mesh which is automatically imported by the DSON installer. Having unimesh (instead of Poser mesh) and DSON subdivision 1 checked before , the export is performing perfectly. In case a symmetrical figure is needed, it is a good idea to copy the left side to the right (or right to left) before exporting from Poser, and to smart resym after importing within ZBrush.

  2. problem with body parts difficult to sculpt: thank you, that’s exactly what I need, great hint!! One remark: if the figure should be symmetrial again afterwards, you have to do the smart resym after showing the whole figure in the end. This is quite time comsuming on higher subdiv levels, however it worked so far.

Thank you very much for your help

#4

Glad you got the export sorted out. For working in ZBrush, you can turn on symmetry (Activate Symmetry in the Transpose palette) and then masking, or hiding the mesh as I described, will be symmetrical as well as sculpting, so you wouldn’t need to use Smart Resym later.