ZBrushCentral

Mirroring and Merging a Subtool

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello again Zbrush Central!

I am currently working on a model but I did not have enough geometry or subdivision to model the hands I originally built in Maya. I constructed new hands in Maya and decided I was going to try to combine them with my Mesh. I sculpted my hand in Zbrush and then I tried to combine it to my current mesh as a subtool. I have two problems with this though.

  1. I cannot mirror one of the hands in Zbrush because it asks me to delete my subdividisonal history! I don’t want to do that! Why can’t I just flip it on the X axis…?

  2. When I merge the tools together to make a new subtool… I hoped just squashing my old hands out of existance would do the trick (I don’t know how to cut them off and I have made many mistakes in my model so the base mesh subdivisions were lost a long time again). When I merged them I get these seams in the model. I then used this tutorial I found online which tells me to export it was and .obj, bring it back in with the import tool and ther Merge Points options on…but this doesn’t work as desired in the tutorial? I read it may have something to do with the subdivisions in the subtools (they are all different…since I had to delete the history of my mirrored one and the hands were sculpted individually)…but I REALLY don’t know!

THIS IS DRIVING ME MAD! I really need this model finished by this Thursday coming and I am running into huge problems!

Help me please!

Thank you,
Sophie.

#2

Hi superwuffles,

–> 1)
I´ve never tried that. Did you use the SubTool Master Plugin?

–> 2)
Yep, I know this video and it would work fine if the topology of “your” :slight_smile: hand and “your” body would be a good match.
BUT you said that the subdivision levels of the tools you´ve merged were different and I think this is the reason why you don´t get a good result.

Have you tried this:
http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Topology

Do you still have the file of the model with its original hands?
Maybe you can edit or retopologize this mesh (–>link) and don´t need to cut the old hands off [and so on] then.

Or why don´t you break your model into parts? This way you could divide just the hands once more --> more Polys.

I´m not sure what´s the best in your case --there might be a better/easier solution but that´s all I can tell you.

#3

  1. Yes - I even used the mirror tool but it seems to delete but subdivision levels. :frowning:

  2. Hmm…I DO still have the hands but the geometry wasn’t very good to begin with… It’s very annoying though cause I sculpted quite decent ones in Zbrush and time is of the essence so if it means a redo that’s what I might have to do. Is there NO way to easily join them together? I can’t subdivide them because they are already on Sub Division of 5 (131000 polys) and if I want both hands to match I have to sub divide the other one more…GAH. And smart Resym doesn’t work because I deleted the lower subdivisions by accident… :frowning:

Thanks for your help so far - this might look like I have to redo it though…

#4

you can reconstruct subD’s back down

tool>geometry>reconstruct subDivision

make sure you have UV’s enabled (it doesn’t actually need them, they just have to be turned on)
tool>texture>enable UV

hope that helps

#5

Hi Sophie,

I can sympathize with your problem of mirroring hands.

As Goast666 suggests this normally works perfectly well. I tend to use it when making eyes for example. However, I did come unstuck earlier this week when I wanted to mirror a glove that had been created using Z-spheres --> Adaptive Skin etc… I had to delete the sub-div history to mirror, but for some reason I was not able to reconstruct the sub-div. Any ideas why this might have been a problem?

Cheers,

Hurricks

#6

hurricks - check the UV’s make sure they are enabled.