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Newbish Second Life clothing questions: workflow, subdividing, retopo, etc.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi all,

After a long break from ZBrush, I’m back at it, now trying to make mesh clothing for Second Life. I’ve got a basic workflow down: I export .xml shapes to Blender/Avastar, whip up an avatar there, export it as .obj to ZBrush, sculpt in ZBrush, rig/weight in Blender, export back to SL. But I’m more used to sculpting heads and human figures in ZBrush than the machine-tooled edges and hems of clothing. So, I have some questions. I won’t blame you all if you don’t have the patience to answer all of them! But even one or two answers would help me a lot. So:

  1. The imported avatar (from SL) is not a thing of beauty, topology-wise. Should I immediately retopo it with Zremesher?

  2. Along the same lines: should I subdivide it before extracting a subtool that will be the basis for a shirt or pants? That’s what I’ve been doing – subdividing to make it easier to paint a clean mask for extracting. Or should I subdivide only after extracting?

  3. Even if I do a pretty clean extraction, I still have trouble cutting a clean neck hole for shirts. (Better luck with arm holes.) The trim-curve or trim-circle brushes seem to be the right tools for this, yes? But I end up with a scraggly circle, even at fairly high resolution. I suppose I need to Zeremesh for a better mesh?

  4. I assume my aim is to subdivide to a high resolution, sculpt fine detail (folds etc) at the highest resolution, then use that to polypaint a color (diffuse?) map, a normal map, maybe a bump map. The detail will come from those maps and textures, not my model’s silhouette. Right?

  5. Once I’ve done that, I need to convert the mesh into a lower-poly version. (Not sure how many polys is my target; anyone know?) I assume I do that by Rezemeshing and choosing a much smaller poly target in the Rezemesh options. That seems to work fine. But I keep hearing I should retopo in Blender instead, and I’m not sure why. Does Blender retopologize better than Rezemesher?

Thanks in advance. And I apologize for the rather long list of questions. :slight_smile:

#2

Before subdividing like crazy, try using the Smooth Groups Brush in the Lightbox>Brushes>Smooth Brushes folder) and rub it around the area for clothing (first duplicate the subtool and Ctrl+W to make the masked area into a polygroup, then unmask). This will give you very clean edges on your extracted clothing.
If your second life object really is very low poly I don’t know as I never use SL), the maybe subdivide once or twice before doing the above.

#3

Thanks for your reply. I’ll give that brush a try.