I’ve been practicing on Zbrush. Now I’ve been trying to extract clothes from a model. My issue is that there is a lot of musculature on the model and I don’t know how to make like he’s not wearing a muscle suit. How do I make the extracted parts look like clothes and not body parts? I thought flatten would work but that digs through the underlying sub tool. Also, the extractions don’t come out nice and clean. Making realistic boots of any kind are impossible using this method. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Hi @Alucard36
Mesh Extracts are a single tool in the toolbox, not a magic “make clothing” button. You can’t build a house with only a hammer. Success in the program requires a comprehensive understanding of all the tools, and how they work together. If you try to leapfrog into using a single tool at the expense of learning the program fundamentals, you might make a statement like this…
…which is clearly not supported by the evidence in the Zbrush user galleries.
Here are some general tips:
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Users often make the mistake of focusing on Zbrush’s high polygon potential for everything, but success in Zbrush sculpting often comes from the ability to work on meshes at different levels of resolution simultaneously. Try performing your extract on a lower poly version of the mesh. The fewer points there are, the less of the muscle detail will be captured, and the easier the resulting mesh will be to smooth when subdivided.
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There is no law stating you have to perform the extract on the actual character mesh. Duplicate your target mesh first, and alter it to provide an extract more in line with what you want. Sculpt it into the shape you want for your clothing, while keeping the general form compatible with your character mesh. For instance, smooth out the musculature a bit. If trying to create boots, sculpt the lower legs into a slightly more boot-like shape. If trying to make a long coat, fuse the legs and turn them into a bell shape so that the resulting mesh has a flare to it.
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While Zbrush generally prefers to work on meshes that are closed volumes with a bit of thickness, in some cases it might be beneficial to set the mesh extract thickness to zero in order to extract a 2d surface without any thickness. It will be easier to pull points into position and smooth that way. Once that surface is acceptable, you can add thickness to it by performing another extract, or if low poly enough, Zmodeler extrusion.
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A mesh extract is usually the first step a sculpting a piece of clothing, not the last. It’s like just taking a wad of clay and lumping it on your figure in the rough shape that you want. You still have to sculpt, smooth, and probably remesh it though. ZRemesher will smooth out a lot of minor flaws once you you get the form right.
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When sculpting on two surfaces that are back to back or extremely close to each other, it is helpful to enable Backface masking. This will keep the effects of your brush from bleeding through to the rear facing surface in most cases. The only foolproof way to protect a surface from sculpting is to hide or mask it, though. Make sure you understand how to work with Polygroups and Masking before trying to do anything in Zbrush. These are critically important skills to getting anything done in the program.
Thanks for the reply. I found it very informative and I’m trying to improve.