ZBrushCentral

(newbie) Question about active points

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi, I’m new here and to ZBrush. I’ve almost no experience with 3D softwares and never did nothing with them but everything seems to flow smoothly when I play with ZBrush.

This is my forth try, made with no real sculpting skills, just some an average drawing level and a few speed modeling videos on YouTube.
BT2.JPG

My question goes about the active points management. I’d wish keep working on the troll head but that’s just the head and its over the limits and it’s not even that detailed (the demo head is much better and it’s only 70,000 total points large). The idea is to add neck, shoulders and a jacket but I don’t know how to keep adding details without exceeding that number. I’ve tried to export it to Rhino but it’s far too heavy for it (it didn’t load after 15 minutes, while human head did it in 2). Maybe it’s something easy and obvious to resolve but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Attachments

THS.JPG

THS2.JPG

thair.JPG

#2

There is a sticky post near the top of this forum that explains how to post images at ZBC so that they can be viewed in your thread.

Regarding your question, have you tried splitting the model into multiple SubTools? A model with multiple SubTools can have many more total polygons than can be achieved with a single SubTool. You can also divide just the SubTool that needs more polygons so that you’re not needlessly adding polygons to parts of the model that don’t need the additional detail.

#3

I did just as posting image thread says but I used Chrome. That explorer is not supported for posting images?

ZBrush interface is somewhat new to me, so I’ll check some tutorials about tool subdivisions. So this is time for another newbie question, what’s the difference between active and total points?

(BTW, thanks for deleting the unnecessary double-posting at Tutorial forum, if that was you or any other admin. New threads take time to appear and I read that forum rules after first posting)

#4

active points , probably means only counting the points on your currently selected subtool (- the ones hidden if you hid some).

Total : sum of all points from all subtools I guess.

I can’t see the images yet, so I can’t exactly answer your initial question. But even though Zbrush lets you sculpt like clay, having a decent initial topology doesn’t hurt. It allows you to go into higher subdivisions more easily and end up with more poly’s in the right places.

There’s usually 2 methods. You pay attention to your topology from the start, mostly done by people used to working in other 3d packages. Or you just go ahead and sculpt away with no real plan and when reaching the limit, you retopologize the highpoly mesh and project the detail from it onto the created lower poly mesh, this mostly gives you the same detail on a model that can now be subdivided even further.

Topology is a somewhat hard subject and the tools for it in Zbrush work, but they aren’t great.

If you want to import a high poly object into Rhino, I’m not sure what you’d want to do with it, but if it’s purely for rendering purposes and texture doesnt matter, you could try the decimation plugin, which allows you to reduce models with millions of poly’s to 200-250.000 polys without losing much/any detail.

#5

Ok, images reposted with Internet Explorer. Let me know if you can see them now or if I should keep editing (I still don’t get the thumbnail thing, if I post them first are they going to appear on the post or into a the thumbnails gallery?)