ZBrushCentral

how do you get those smooth organic faces?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey,

How do you get those smooth organic faces when Hard Surface sculpting? any tips?
The trouble is that after all the smoothing and polishing and trimming I’m left with large curving surfaces that now have very slight mid frequency variations. at this point more polishing just seems to move the trouble areas around the mesh. sort of like trying to push trapped bubbles from under adhesive decals.
Also, when polishing near edges I can’t seem to find a brush setting / brush that doesn’t sort of disturb the surface on the opposite side of the edge that I’m trying to preserve. So I’ll keep hopping from one side to the other and never really seeming to get rid of the problem.
So how do I get those nice machined looking edges and surfaces? is there a tutorial anywhere showing this…
I’ve got both the eat3d Hard Surface sculpting dvd’s which certainly taught me absolutely loads of stuff… but these 2 things seem to elude me still…

any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated…

Cheers

#2

I suggest using retopology. You first create a concept sculpt using a Dynawax ball, getting the general shape of your model out, and then you retopologize the model in parts (depending on the complexity of the model) using a zsphere. You then crease the necessary edges and subdivide to get those smooth, machined contours.

At least, that’s how I learned how to do it from tutorials.

But what with zmodeler being introduced in 4R7, you might get better results doing low-poly modeling. I’m still playing around zmodeler myself, so I can’t be of help there.

Sorry if it sounds nebulous, but that’s just a very generalized explanation. I’ll leave it to the experts to give you some more comprehensive help.

#3

Hey,

Thanks for the reply.
i’ve looked into it and experimented a little and I think you’re right about retopo…
Also think I’m trying to smooth out a mesh that is too dense. I’ve had much better results by keeping the poly count low as possible.

I’m curious as to why you would use the zSphere approach to retopo tho. I’ve just read about the retopo brush in the docs and it looks much easier to use. ( i’ve never used it but i HAVE used the zsphere retopo tool and found it to be somewhat awkward)

thanks again for the reply.

cheers

#4

I’m glad I could help, Rob!

I’ve played around with the topology brush, but I find that it’s not all that precise or convenient for hard surfaces, especially since I’m using a keyboard and mouse. With zphere topology, I can just click from one point to another and create perfectly straight lines.

I guess it’s all a matter of preferences, though.