Hi there, I’m new on the forum!
I’ve been using ZBrush for about a year and a half, I’ve been watching a lot of videos to understand how to do most of what I’ve done, so I’m still gradually learning.
I’m doing my first ever project, it’s a male full body, it’s kinda samurai in a pose with a katana in his hands. I’ve done most of the body, it’s still missing the head and the feet. I’m doing the naked body to learn to sculpt a body in general and, when I’ll be done, I’ll add the clothes.
One thing is not clear to me yet and I’m having a lot of problems, especially with the hands and arms: whenever (for example) the fingers are too close, when I use dynamesh the two fingers join together making them pretty bad looking, it basically creates a “bridge” and merges them together. I’ve tried to separate them by assigning them different polygroups, but I guess that wasn’t the solution to this problem at all. What should I do? Or better yet, since I don’t want to bother anyone, what should I look for? Because the main problem is that I don’t know how to specify this problem, so I don’t know how to look for it online.
I hope I managed to explain the problem.
Thank you very much!
Hi @ShadowX5452
Welcome to the forum!
There are a few issues in play here.
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Shortest answer: Increase the Dynamesh resolution slider to capture finer amounts of detail.
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When creating a mesh from scratch in Zbrush for use with Dynamesh, you want to make sure to perform a Tool > Deformation > Unify on it, to average out its size in the Zbrush worldspace for best performance with Dynamesh and other tools. The reasons for this are explained in this video. Objects that are abnormally small in the worldspace may have trouble increasing their resolution sufficiently to capture detail.
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What type of piece are you trying to create? If working for a more “sculptorly” posed in place piece, you would be working with solid forms like a real life sculptor, and wouldnt necessarily try to separate the digits.
- If working for animation, or a character you would like to pose, you must take special care to keep the neutral or T-pose of the character as evenly spread out as possible. Keep the digits and limbs relaxed and separate with as much space as possible between them.
- Remember that tools like dynamesh are primarily intended for the creation of low-medium detail meshes. To be able to sculpt the finest detail, you will eventually need to subdivide the mesh and work on it with multiple levels of subdivision. So with dynamesh, concentrate on blocking out your major forms, and don’t over commit to fine detail.
Okay, so I’m not working with animation (I tried doing it and it drives me crazy, so maybe it’s not for me), it’s a still statue.
I’ll try to perform unify on it and I’ll watch the video to understand the reasons behind it.
I didn’t know that dynamesh was something like an intermediate step before high quality, so that’s both reassuring (because at least there’s a solution and I don’t need to aim at perfection now) and scaring (because I need to learn more about subdivision).
The thing about separating the fingers is that it really looks bad if the fingers are not close enough to touch each other but they are joined together by a bridge of “skin” that shouldn’t exist, but again, I’ll have to learn about subdivision after I finish the whole body.
Thank you for your answer!