ZBrushCentral

Can you lengthen the middle of something, without messing up the ends?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Let’s say you made a dog, and you wanted to make it more like a sausage dog (long body), without messing up the head end and legs, and the back end and legs. You want to move them away from each other, thereby lengthening just the middle.
Is that possible?
I have tried many things, here’s the closest I’ve got:

Mask the back end. Transpose move and lengthen the rest of the dog forwards. Mask up to behind the front legs. Transpose the front end (move) back to a more normal appearance. Just the middle is now longer.

I’m wondering if there’s a way to do it without deforming / re-deforming one end of the dog (or whatever it may be)?
Or is this the best solution?

Cheers,
Steve.

#2

you could try the following.

make a duplicate, mask of half of the dog, down the middle of the body.
go to polygroups and select “groupmasked”.

now you have two groups.

mask off one group, in other words, half the dog.

move the other half of the dog to create the desired space between the two parts.
if you have to, split the parts into two subtools, then after moving, merge them back.

then make another duplicate of the original (leaving the original for backup), and stretch it as long as needed and lining it up as best possible to the other two parts, delete the ends, leaving just the body, then merge them together.

then dynamesh with blur set to 0.

smooth out and touch up the body.

and you should be good.

#3

but it would be nice if ZB had a “stretch middle” function.

something like a new “moveable mask”. where you could mask one end like normal, to hold it in place, and then one could mask off the other end with “move mask”. then you could move that end around while all the detail covered by the mask is protected.

#4

I was trying your suggestion and here’s what I found, which turned out a bit simpler.
I made each end a polygroup.
I hid the back end, moved the front end forward, and when I un-hid the back end it was connected to the front via an elongated middle, so that worked out with a bit of dynameshing and projecting details back in.
I would be nice if I could move it forward without being ‘blind’ as to its distance from the back, but it worked out.
Thanks!