ZBrushCentral

Dynamesh, Sculptris and resolution of both.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hya Everyone! (Hya Zber!!)
I have a few questions here but I will start off with what I am doing and some ideas or misconceptions I have…
What I’m trying to do is take things from Sculptris, turn them into Dynamesh and have them in Zbrush with Zbrush style polygons (Personally I like how Sculptris stuff looks in Zbrush but thats me).
What is happening is that even with dynamesh set to 1024 it blurs everything to the point I may as well just start over (not happening GRIN!).
Is Dynamesh the same thing as the “remesh all” button in the subtool pallet?
If so is there a way to crank it up a bit? like maybe 2048? Or more?
Or… hehehe… Am I just doing it wrong?
I was sort of under the impression that dynamesh was the Zbrush equivalent of Sculptris but it seems to be a fraction of the detail level of Sculptris.

One thing I have noticed is that I have had dynamesh spheres mush into 700,000+ polygons or points or what ever they are, and the stuff I am trying to bring over from Sculptris is in the 200,000 range so it seems like this should be do-able…
Right?

Cheers and thanks!
Mealea

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between point and polygon count?

#2

Im in the wrong thread!!! CRAP!!!
Sorry!!!

#3

You aren’t in the wrong thread-topic.
(you may are as long you haven’t share your spectacular achievements using sculptris and zb in this topic :lol:)
Sculptris and dynamesh aren’t very good friends.
However:
Import the sculptris mesh in zb (GoZ) , duplicate it. Drop this new to dynamesh (a resolution of 128 or 64 should work). Now you have a blurred mesh. Subdivide it (for a sculptris mesh ~500k a 1-3 M should work ) Project all (watch out the default distance value is 0.02 should be ~ 0.2 or 0.5 )

#4

I just watched the Youtube vids posted in the other forum. That Dynamesh is Da Bomb !!!
Its WAY better than Sculptris, cuz you can bring the resolution down, Insta low-poly !!
However, on that note, Retopo for low-poly is the only reason I can see why you’ld want to Remesh or Dynamesh in Zbrush 4R2, and if you’ve got Zbrush 4R2, Why are u F@(K!N around with Sculptris ? Sculptris is for Freebie, handout, low budget, no-good, dirty rotten … you don’t go to the bad side of town with a full wallet and announce it ? Do ya ? Where do you live ? …

#5

Bare in mind here that I have only had dynamesh for a few days… however;
Sculptris is a totally different tool, and as far as dynamesh being better I have not seen it. Sculptris allows me to make all sorts of stuff very quickly, increase or decrease poly counts with the click of a button, on the fly as I sculpt or by using a brush to remove or add them selectively. In other words, for what I need, perfect retopo.
Dynamesh is very low resolution, you constantly have to nurse it along to keep your mesh from shredding and its not even close to as fluid as Sculptris. It has a few things going for it like a number of rather cool brushes but honestly in the short time I have had it I have been unable to make what I have set out to make. That will change as I get used to it (and I will) but the fact is that I learned Sculptris in about one or two hours, dynamesh has been driving me nuts for three or four days (I enjoy being driven nuts).
Pixologic is not a stupid company, they got Dr. Peter and Sculptris for a very very good reason, it and he are EXCELLENT.
As for where I live its about 2 1/2 miles off shore and the nearest land is as safe as any place swarming with humanity.
Does that answer your questions?
If not I can go on at length about things such as ease of use not interfering with creativity and other such lofty tripe.

Cheers!
Mealea

#6

Dynamesh is faster and more accurate (in terms of form) than the remesh and projection in the subtool palette, but it is best used for establishing form in low to medium resolution meshes. If you already have your form established in a medium res+Sculptris model, the dividends you’ll see from Dynamesh are minimal, and perhaps its time just to get on with traditional high resolution Zbrush sculpting at that point.

The traditional remesh and projection tools in the Subtool menu will allow for a higher mesh resolution and a transfer of finer detail, so it may be better to use those to make an imported Sculptris model friendly for Zbrush sculpting, rather than dynamesh, depending on the situation. In my opinion, you do want to convert that mesh to quads for the best performance in Zbrush.

…

In terms of Dynamesh manual re meshing vs Sculptris dynamic tessellation, they’re just different animals, but both functionally the same in terms of how much mileage you can get out of them before needing to switch over to Hi rez Zbrush sculpting. There are a couple things that Sculptris Dynamic tessellation can do, that Dynamesh cant achieve in same way, for instance, pulling a long tendril out and just snaking it around indefinitely. You would have to do this differently in Zbrush, as the base mesh would stretch and distort before you could remesh.

But there are about a million, really useful things that the full range of Dynamesh tools can do that Sculptris can’t. And in practice, Sculptris hits a performance wall before long in meshes that I would consider medium resolution by Zbrush standards. Either way, I find both tools are well suited for establishing form in low to medium rez meshes, but a similar ceiling exists in both, and sooner or later you’re going to want to get on with High rez sculpting in Zbrush, for refinement and detail.

#7

That is just what I did, and learned a bit too about “Project” but it didn’t work as well as I hoped, I think I know where I went wrong however, I think I missed the subdivide part but I will have to look at that in the morning
Thanks!

Oh… I will post all my Sculptris stuff here too… sorry, I just never thought it was that good honestly and Michalis, “spectacular achievement” is a grotesque exaggeration but I am still completely flattered!

Thank you!

#8

Thanks for this, I think I was expecting a sort of replacement but it seems that its a rather different tool then I was expecting.
On thing I have noticed is that every time I hit the add button I lose all sense of shape, depth and form and it was making me crazy till I realized I was using mesh deformation to see what I was doing in Zbrush with normal (non dynamesh) mesh. Dynamesh makes them all square.
Since I realized that things are improving but still a but slow.
I’m still rather new at all this and so in 4.0 I got used to using the mesh it self as a sort of guide, for example if I was building up and adding subdivisions I would make little dents or marks in the mesh to indicate for later where a detail would go or a curve would be.
Its going to be VERY fun getting the hang of this and its already great converting old stuff and mushing it around and poking holes in things.

I have a LOT to learn!

Cheers!
Mealea

#9

@MealeaYing

I tried to explain that dynamesh can be used as the old remesh and it’s much more accurate.
Import your sc mesh
duplicate it
dynamesh the second using low as possible settings. (for instance if it’s a bust 8 or 16 or 32 will work, if it’s a figure -fingers etc then go higher to capture these)
subdivide it a few times (you gonna need a 1-2M mesh to capture details from a ~500 800 K tri SC-mesh)
project all (distance parameter is by default 0.02, use 0.2, 0.1 or more -undo and try a few times)
That’s it. A quasi retopo method. Resulting to a multi resolution mesh, capturing all the fine details of sculptris mesh, it’s a quad mesh now and more friendly for more zbrushing.

Another possible flow for sculptris lovers could be:
Start in dynamesh with a 64 resolution. Keep it like this. Do your holes and insterts, try spline tools (great).
GoZ to sculptris, triangulate it and work. Back to zbrush for the rest. :wink:

A third possibility (what I’m trying now) is to forget sculptris and work in zbrush only. :slight_smile:

#10
#11

If your just wanting quad geometry, Blender has a function (alt+j) that will do exactly that. However, the problem with Blender is that most of these type function will dump your UV-mapping. Also, both Blender and Wings3D have a Sculpting function now, and Blender has painting as well. I personally think Sculptris’s Paint-Mode is the best! But I prefer to build geometry from other apps …

#12

@justadeletedguy
ctrl+J in blender will mess everything, have you tried it? It will manage to convert only some tris to quads and if not crashing, maybe holes will appear. This blender tool never worked correctly.
zbrush has also a way to convert tris to quads when importing obj (forget GoZ). It’s under import settings palette. Tri2quad. It won’t turn all tris to quads though. that’s impossible.
Blender is sculptris’s best friend (or the opposite), it’s a great retopo tool (I should write a tut on this, though some exist already but a deferent approach is always interesting) , a fine UV editor, it isn’t as bad as painter and has a continously under development sculpting (ZBrush like) room. Interesting render engines too. A fine app.
Both sculptris and blender won the prices of best apps of 2011 as we all noticed. Not because they are free.
The learning curve of blender though… well, the UI isn’t terrible, better than Maya (IMO) but the open source community is a place that it’s hard to find good tuts.

#13

I kept trying to reply but the only thing that showed up was the quote.

Any how, I did as you instructed and had better results for retopo, so you are correct, lower rez dynamesh rather then high. Neat!

Going back and forth between Sculptris and dynamesh works sort of, it gets very unstable very quickly with “too many triangles attached to edge, Max = 2” errors cropping up and chunks of mesh vanishing, that might just be my fault however…

The third option is sort of ok but dynamesh is sort of blurry to me and I actually like seeing the shape of the polygons while I’m working, having them all square makes things look flat. Honestly I like Sculptris and I have a lot of getting used to dynamesh.

Is it me or is dynamesh more MeshMixer then Sculptris?

Grin!
Back at it, I have a LOT to learn!

#14

Luckily for me I have no idea what UV mapping is and what I have seen of it is not something that looks like any fun. As near as I can tell its like peeling an orange while on bad drugs and then trying to paint an orange with whats left of the peel in some other program.
Most likely I’m wrong about that but so far UV maps are just something that Zbrush gets cranky about sometimes when Im trying to put a texture on an object, usually the projection master shuts it up though.
They and normal maps and a few other things I will look into when I’m a bit better at this stuff, right now I can paint on my objects in poly paint, projection master, Paint Stop, in normal edit mode with the pen tools (neat and weird) and spotlight, so those things have a long wait till I look into them.
Oh yah! and I can paint in Sculptris too! I love that program!
The need for quads is not all that important to me, merging Sculptris’s ease of use with Zbrush is and as it turns out dynamesh is not what is going to provide that I dont think… I will know more about that soon however I think… and hope…

Cheers!
Mealea

#15

Yes, UV-mapping is just your model cut and flattened like clothing pieces before they’re sewn together. The pieces are arranged, and then an image can be projected onto the model. The process is/was used to add detail to models which were much more low-poly than Zbrush. The other method of coloring your model is Poly-painting. Its done by assigning colors to the individual vertices, then a gradient will form between changing colors. Zbrush uses Poly-painting and this is why your model must be subdivided heavily to get any good detail, then this information is transfered to a texture image map. Sculptris Auto-UV’s your model (the part you have to wait for) and then paints directly to the texture image, bypassing the subdividing and poly-painting steps. This is easier on lower-end computers with less memory, but its also why its not backwards compatible (sculpt after painting). Also, Sculptris UV’s are not very good for animating, most auto-UV’s are not. So after retopo, a pro will usually do this by hand, trying to keep seems hidden, depending on how the model is meant to be viewed, and paying attention to stretching. I found a nice little free app Roadkill thats very helpful for this. It’s hard to learn cuz theirs not much for tutorials, but it works great.

#16

Well that was about the best explanation of UV mapping I have ever seen, you could replace a lot of drivel in Wikipedia with that!

Michalis sugestions led to a vast improvement in quick retopo using Dynamesh, and that is rather interesting, eye lids get eaten no mater what I do but thats ok, Im not after retopo so much as Sculptris to Zbrush compatibility and back… its fairly bad with Dynamesh so far.

Thanks you guys for all this, its very very interesting!

Cheers!
Mealea

#17

I’ve learned more in about a half a year, from this thread, than I did in the prior 5-6 years before. I started playing with Poser 5, a friend had bought it and couldn’t do anything with it. To build my own content, I the started learning Wings3D. Since then I’ve Googled, downloaded installed, and played with almost every 3D freeware and trial I could get my hands on. Most of them were based on 3ds Max, or at least the windows and tool placement was. And most of them were junk, for one reason or another. The improvements in just the last two years, to this whole industry are astounding. And Sculptris, as is, could have been sold for 100$ or better. Blender now has the power Max does, and a decent interface. In the month prior to Pixologic releasing Sculptris Alpha 6, there was a lot of discussion on Retopology, the interest was to be able to use Sculptris models in external apps, animating them and such. 3DCoat, XNormal, and Blender 2.5 along with Zbrush were suggested. All this and more is in this forum, you just gotta look for it …

#18

MealeaYing
Take it one at a time.
retopology is the harder and depends on what you gonna do latter.
You’re not an animator so far, so, I tried to find some quasi methods for this.

UV mapping is easier BTW.
Here, have in mind, that you can unwrap (UVs) low def poly meshes only. Don’t try to UV a 1M mesh, please don’t LOL. So, after this quasi retopo method involving dynamesh or other, after having subdivisions, projections and having capture the more of your details, after some more after-retopo Zsculpting, it’s time to learn (very easy) Zbrush UV master. Excellent UVs in one click.

I believe, it’s out of this thread to start writing about the best, the more accurate, more pro methods. You didn’t ask for this and all these auto quasi methods will help you to understand the Pro ones after all. The same principles.

You keep mentioning projection-master… my advise is to stay away from it. It’s an old method and there’re better alternatives in zbrush.

Using dynamesh low remeshing as retopo method you’re loosing some details you say.
Why don’t you try my older quasi retopo method then? The same principles but no dynamesh and quads.
Just duplicate the sculptris mesh and use [decimation master] at extreme low settings to have a ~20k mesh. Use one click UV master on this if you like, you know the rest. Subdivide it and project. This may be more interesting as will capture you fine detail easier. :wink:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?143454-My-beta-testing-doodles&p=851156&viewfull=1#post851156

#19

Projection Master is still a very useful tool for detailing models, even if you wouldn’t use it for bulk texturing anymore.

Just saying.

#20

I haven’t try projectionmaster in zb4r2, did they fixed an issue with color painting?