I’ve been reading about Zbrush a lot and I’ve just downloaded and experimented with the trial version. After making a lot of changes to a basic shape such as a sphere I often get bunched up vertices. How do I fix something like that? In real life I would just add a lump of clay to patch it up. But the clay brush in Zbrush doesn’t quite work that way.
Im a noob myself but i would suggest smoothing that area out by holding shift and clicking.
If you turn on Frame you will see the problem.
Do this by hitting Shift-F while in Edit Mode.
You answered the question when you said topology.
A sphere has poles at each end that are Triangles.
Triangles always cause this pinching effect.
And if you try and smooth them out, it will get worse.
Try starting with a plain low-res Cube…
Having a good distribution of polygon density is hugely important as you’ve started to notice. There are many different of ways to work good topology into your model. Using the smooth brush can help in certain situations, but can be a bit of a brute force method as it averages the position of your vertices in 3D space, thus also wiping out any detail you’ve laboured to put into the sculpt.
One way would be to utilize the Nudge brush. If you turn the Polyframe display mode as Xsmoke suggested you’ll get a good idea of the distribution of your polygons. With the Nudge brush you can move the vertices of polygons along the surface of the model without the shape being affected (to a degree). This way, with a bit of effort you can redirect where dense areas of polygons are occuring. I use this method a lot in the beginning of a sculpt started from a base mesh that has little concern for proper edge flow.
The nudge brush will only get you so far though as it cannot change poorly laid out edge flows (such as a head sculpt started from a sphere).
For the most optimum way of redistributing your topology ZBrush offers retopology tools. Search for ‘retopology’ here on the forums and you’ll find heaps of info on the subject.
Take a look at the TOOL > Geometry > Reproject-Higher-Subdivide Button (hold down shift and cursor over the button to see popup help as to what it does and how to use it…)
Note that you need to set the Sdiv slider below highest subdivisions to make the button clickable.
Sven
Thank you all for your suggestions. I’ll spend some time to explore all the ideas, some of which I don’t understand at all, yet.
It would be real nice (and perhaps it is already possible in ZB?) to be able to select (paint) an area and say ‘replace all the vertices in this with a uniform flat grid’. I suppose such a grid will not have the proper flow for animation purposes. But for pure sculpting it would look fine and work well for subsequent sculpting. The ‘flatten’ brush doesn’t quite do it, as it simply squashes overlapping folds even closer together, without getting rid of the folded over vertices.
Maybe re-topologizing will achieve something to that effect. But I’ve read the beginning of the topology section of the manual and it is very vague, at least to a newbie. There are no diagrams and no examples. But a manual is mainly read by newbies! Oh well, I’m sure all the struggles will be worth it, judging from the great work ZB users have created!