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Retopology problems [SOLVED]

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hiya folks,

Had a search through some other posts regarding retopo and couldnt find my problem so here goes.

I’ve been re-topologising a female figure and have been getting on just fine until i reached the hands (which i left until last, knowing they would be a pain). Now i have some major issues. Firstly, i cant see for the life of me what i’m placing where, which is a combination of not being zoomed in enough and not being able to rotate around just the hand. Any tips there?

Second, i’ve got this happening:

Here is a pic of the retopo mesh for the hand so far:

Im getting a bit tired of this whole re-topo lark :cry:

Right, any help muchly appreciated! It would be rather gutting to get the whole thing practically done only to fall at the last hurdle.

Cheers

EDIT: Right! After several hours of fiddling and swearing, i seem to have cracked this little problem. Quite simply, the fingers didnt have enough edge loops at the base and for some reason this was creating quirky geometry. Added in a new ‘edge’ on all the fingers and voila! All fixed :smiley: Hope this maybe helps someone else out there.

#2

For your first problem, try turning on Transform>Local. This causes the model to be rotated around the last edited point, rather than the geometric center.

For your second problem, it might be due to the scale of your model. To compensate, try reducing the Tool>Topology>Max Strip Length slider to its minimum setting of 4.

#3

Hello
To rotate around the fingers u can turn ‘local’ on;)
To get your retopomesh mess cleaned up you can export the mesh an fix it in modo silo hexagon maya max lw or any other polygonmodeler and reimport it on to your basemesh :wink:
To retopo the fingers it’s best to spread the fingers off the hand a little bit.
For better zooming you can scale up the model with the deformers under the tools tab :wink:

HopeThisHelps a little

Greetings
kel

Edit: oops. aurick was faster … :eek:

#4

Thanks both for your replies.

I realise that i forgot to mention that the distorted mesh only appears when i view the skin with ‘projection’ on, but perhaps you had guessed that. The adaptive skin looks fine without projection.

Changing the max strip length sadly didnt seem to make a difference Aurick.

Kelvin: If i finish up the retopo mesh in Silo say, and import it back as the base mesh for my model, won’t it have a problem with the different polygon counts?

Thanks for your help!

#5

There are certain cases where projection doesn’t work on an open mesh. Try finishing the process of closing the mesh. You’ll then most likely get good projections again.

#6

Good point Aurick, finished up the mesh on the hand and it seems to have at least narrowed the problem down the between the first 2 fingers:

As far as i can see the mesh is watertight, so it’s a bit confusing. Here’s the mesh anyway:

I’ll try re-working that part of the topology and see if it makes a difference.

Edit: Also, the problem only occurs when viewing the projected adaptive skin on any density above one.

#7

Nope. I exported the retopomesh and did some tweaks in modo (on the retopomesh) and reimported it ON TOP of the base mesh. Vertexorder or polycount doesn’t matter. Just there are some issues occuring if you have some lets say a square tubes (like you may get them at your fingers). In squaresectional view of one finger there sould be at least a pentagon. otherwhise ZBrush could mess some areas up.
You can import any mesh for retopo.
try this button (see Pic below) to import the topomesh.

Just in case the origin of the mesh has shifted you have to help yourself with deformers or subtools to fit those two meshes on top of each other. Happy ZBrush3.1ing kel

Attachments

SelectTopo.jpg