How do I retain fine detail on sub tool when projecting? (See text.)

[Alucard36]

Alright, I’m working on a vest for several of my characters, and I’ve run into a few problems when trying to project details into another sub tool with subdivisions.

I projected the details of the high res model into each subdivision of the target model. In fact, the highest subdivision level ended up being higher than the high res model.

To make the model with subdivisions I duplicated the high res model then used z remesher then tessimate/decimate.

The vest itself turned out fine, but anything like the fine detailing like the imm brushes of very thin lace and strings falling off the vest were ruined. The buttons which were also insert multi meshes were also ruined. Any extraction was ruined.

Please note this was one sub tool with several subdivisions and the original vest I made was an extract from a base mesh.

I want to make UVs and a normal map so I can apply them to my game model but Zbrush isn’t maintaining all of the details.

Could I keep everything (vest, buttons, lace,etc) as it’s own separate sub tool and use inflate to make the more delicate parts to remain detailed before and after projection? Then I could combine all of the sub tools, but that would leave me back at square one as all of the subdivisions would go bye bye and I would lose my low res model, which I need for uvs and a normal map.

Please note I’m still new to Zbrush and 3D sculpting and programs in general.

Thanks to anyone for any assistance.

[Spyndel]

Hi @Alucard36,

Pictures would be very useful here as there are a lot of different issues that you can have with projection that might be recognizable and fixable. It may simply be an issue with your process.

1. You generally get better results projecting from one fused mesh to another. So rather than trying to project a multiple fine detail subtools separately onto a single fused mesh, fuse those pieces together first with live boolean to get rid of overlapped or extraneous geometry, remesh that mesh, and project the detail onto it.

2. The “Dist” slider in the Subtool> Project All menu frequently needs to be increased, or even maxed out to avoid holes or deformities in the projection. This applies to all methods of projection in the program, like Undo History projection.

3. This video might be useful:

[Alucard36]

@Spyndel
Thanks for the reply. This time, I inflated the sub tools that were on the vest, especially on the red and blue lace that’s hanging off of it. This time, I tried playing with projection settings. I’m still not able to get great results because I’m still new to the projection tools. I tried bringing the cage size to .5 which is max, the distance to 1 which is max. This vest is almost 3 million polys before doing anything. Then, I used zremesh, decimation master and Tessimate on a duplicated model. I think I will be able to reproduce all of the details except the lace when I project the mesh. I may have to add the lace later since on the remeshed version, the lace topology on the lowest subdivision level gets completely destroyed if it isn’t inflated. Even when I inflate the results are pretty bad. Any ideas on how to keep the lace? Because it’s a game character, would the lower subdivision count of 2k to 5k polys for a vest be okay?

The first photo is best result I got, which isn’t great. The second photo is a duplicate of the original with some poly groups inflated before remeshing.

The third image is the original hi res model.

Please note the lace is from an imm brush.

Any additional advice would be helpful. Thanks.

[Alucard36]

I’ve come to the point where I HATE Z Remesher. It completely ruined my low poly topology. I may have to look for external retopology software.