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How to cut out a separate piece of a mesh?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

What is a good technique to cut out and separate part of a mesh?

Specifically, if I model a head and want to create a ventriloquist dummy with a separate jaw piece (so that it ca be rigged later) from the original sculpt of a single head mesh, how would I do this? I have thought of using a Boolean.

#2

I am assuming that you are talking about doing this within ZBrush for this answer. Depending on how many polys are in your head there are a couple of options:

  1. Make a copy of your head by duplicating the subtool. Mask the polygons you want to separate. Press Control + W to make the masked polygons a separate poly group. Then Subtool>Split>Group Split to separate the mesh by its polygroups. You should now have 2 separate meshes, one for the head minus the jaw and 1 for the jaw.

OR

  1. Make a copy of your head by duplicating the subtool. Now using shift + Ctrl carefully select the areas you want to have as a separate mesh being careful to make all other polygons not visible. Now mask these polys that are visible. Then select Subtool>Split>Split Masked Points. You should now have 2 separate meshes, one for the head minus the jaw and 1 for the jaw.

Depending on how many polys you have, it can be tricky to get just the right polygons selected, but with persistence and practice and a combination of the techniques above, you should be able to get what you want with a head mesh of ~ 10K or under.

Good luck.

1 Like
#3

works thank you