ZBrushCentral

Help a new guy sculpt some hard edges.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello everyone!

I recently found an interest in sculpting and I’ve been practising like a mad man with tutorials and the like. I took off with my first real personal beginner project recently, and found a character which I wanted to sculpt.

I’m at the stage where I want to shape in the head. However I found myself unable to find a way for making these pointy and sharp pieces of broken wood. I’ve tried to no avail using the different clipping brushes, but most of them can’t make these hard cuts without mocking it all up. ClipCurve does the trick somewhat, but more times than not I get spiky artefacts on my sculpt around the cut area.

Now I’m still a rookie so my sculpt is still very rough and clunky. Sorry. I wanted to ask you people here for some help on how to go about making this guy’s head. At the moment the head is dynameshed at 512.
Here’s a picture of how he looks now, and the main image I’m using.
http://puu.sh/gnXNL/16cee2a1ed.png
Thank you for your time. :slight_smile:

#2

You might be lacking polygons where you need them most (near the wooden spikes). Try this:
use the Slice Curve brush to draw out where the hard edges should go, then draw the same shape again with the Clip Curve brush. This should move the polygons towards your new edges. (Remember to double-tap Alt while drawing).

#3

I was curious if there was a best solution to this problem and I couldn’t really find anything that’s easy and works reliably. The standard ZBrush tools solve hard edges by throwing more polygons at the problem. :cry:

To simulate your head with spikes I created a 100k sphere and then tried to chop a segment out of it - kind of like Pac-Man. My best results for hard edges and reasonable poly count were achieved with this approach:

  1. Slice Curve to get one half of the segment
  2. Slice Curve to get the other half. Two steps are needed because a single Slice sometimes creates wrong edges for some reason.
  3. Hold Ctrl-shift and Double-click the new polygroup to make it invisible.
  4. Geometry/Modify Topo/Delete Hidden gets rid of the hidden polygons.
  5. Load ZModeler Brush (BZM) and hover over the lowest edge on one side. Hold Space bar and select Bridge & Edges.
  6. Let go of Space and click on the edge. Then spin the object 180 degrees and click on the matching edge of the other side. This creates a small sliver that acts as scaffolding.
  7. Almost done. Click Geometry/Modify Topo/Close Holes to have ZBrush fill in the blanks.

bzm.jpg