Ive been experiementing with this this week too, because I too have a problematic mesh Imn working with right now. Sadly, ZB just seems to do this every now and then, and I havent figured out what the exact circumstances , or what mesh characteristics make it happen. I can however, tell you what, Im my experience, greatly reduces the frequency of these incidents and the fastest ways Ive found to deal with it.
- I actually think this is an issue that has more to do with the textures or uv coords on the meshes, than the geometry itself, although it ends up affecting the geometry. Remove your texture (texture menu>remove) from the mesh before doing any geometrical transformations to the mesh…this includes editing, deforming, or even going up and down subd levels. Only apply the texture when your are painting the texture itself, rendering, or preparing to save the tool (so it exports with the tool).
When you remove the texture it will be gone from the top menu bar texture menu, but still availiable via the texture menu on the left. As long as you are working in a saved document, dedicated to your tools, that saves material information, you should bve able to re apply it any time untill you close the file (mat info will save, but the texture wont unless you save it with the tool)as long as you dont reassign new uv coords.
This may not be ideal, but by doing this, and I am quite certain, I have vastly decreased (to almost zero) the amount of random errors and flyaway vertices that were being generated before. And you really want a texture- less mesh to maximize editibility anyways, when it starts getting resource intensive, even though its so alluring to have all those wonderful shaders applied when youre actually sculpting to see them change in real time.
The only other time that I would get these errors, is when I picked up when using projection master. Theres the known issue when painting deformation over an edge in pm, it can cause flyaways, but it also seem to cause a flaw every now and then when just painting with regular colour and picking up. You should examine your mesh after every pickup. The flaws make your mesh unstable if undetected, and commonly get worse, especially when going up and down subd levels…either resulting in that phenomenon where you go up or down a level and the whole mesh goes to hell, or it just crashes the program.
If you detect a flaw, and all youve been doing is texture painting, then the easiest thing to do is just hit “undo” till you reach the point where you picked it up. Painted material and texture information will not be undone, so you wont loose it. If youve passed the point of no return, you can repair the mesh manually as in the thread aurick linked you too, though theres no doubt this can be a pain…or…something that Ive started doing, I save out an OBJ of the base mesh at level 1 everytime I make any sort fundamental change in the geometry (adding, deleting polys, selective subdividing, as the geometry has tobe exactly the same to re-import it)). I do this rather than having to devote file memory to storing a morph target. Most of the time Importing this levl 1 obj back into the active tool at level one, will fix the flaws in the higher levels, without losing much or any of the hi level detail youve sculpted in.
Saving so frequently, in so many different file versions is a bit of a nerve racking way to work, but to be fair, zb is far from the only 3d app I feel compelled to do this in. I look forward to when Pixologic gets this ironed out.
But when you so brilliantly rewrite the book on 3d image generation, I suppose you have to expect a bit of wonkiness.
P.S. It should be noted, I really started to notice these errors after switching to to Silo to do my basic meshwork, from a Wings/Lightwave tandem previously. However, that was also the same time I started viewing ZB as more of a final output solution and doing so much more sculpting, painting, material mapping, etc., whereas before I had only used it for mesh enhancement, and displacement map generation, so the relationship could be entirely spurious.
Ive tried sorting out L1 then disp L2 etc but i just keep mving them in the wrong axis!
