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My sculpts keep going blocky and pixilated - Help!

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi,
I’m sculpting a model and have a few questions regarding subdivision, efficiency and such.

My model is quite simple, and in order to get detail in the face I’ve had to subdivide the model. I’m at 6.725 million active points.

After I’ve finished my ZSpheres and begin to sculpt, I usually subdevide to start adding in more detail, but areas start to become pixelated or blockey. I’ve watched several tutorials (ZClassroom) and they don’t seem to have this problem.

If I reduce the subdivision my detail dissappears. And I can’t seem to subdivide any further for some reason. Is sculpting on low subdivisions better for general mass for example.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m really new to ZBrush and this problem is stopping me advance any further.

Computer specs:

4GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.40GHz CPU
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
Vista

Using ZBrush 4.

#2

If u have zbrush4r2 or zbrush4r2b try Dynamesh. Go to tool geometry click the dynamesh button try uping the resolution then hold cntrl and draw a square release it. see if that helps.

#3

If I reduce the subdivision my detail dissappears. And I can’t seem to subdivide any further for some reason. Is sculpting on low subdivisions better for general mass for example.

Depending on your machine, you’ll have a maximum number of polygons/vertices available per subtool.

As for the blockiness, it’s going to boil down to the topology of the base mesh on the lowest subdivision level; 6 million points might not be enough to sufficiently produce the detail if the majority of those points are being spent inefficiently (which might happen if you tried to sculpt a full face from a sphere, for example). In this case you could use Remesh/Dynamesh to try and get a more unified distribution for the topology, or you could manually retopologize the face (externally with a program like maya/topogun, or internally with zspheres) in order to work in more efficient edgeloops.

A common workflow might be to roughly sculpt out the major/overall form and features of a head, retopologize it, and then continue sculpting in the details.

And yeah, I like to use the lower subdivision levels to work out the overall mass. It’s possible to do it on the higher levels, but unless you really have a grasp on what you’re doing then there is a very good chance that things will end up looking blobby. It can sometimes be pretty easy to spot when an artist tried to jump straight to sculpting on a higher subdivision level.