Hey there.
Im studying ZBrush 2018 Sculptris Pro and saw that some people use it with Dynamesh. I made a few tests and didnt notice any advantage since dynamesh will increase the overall polycount and usually lost the minor details.
Can somebody explain why to use both instead of just one?
Thanks
Sculptris and Dynamesh are iterative processes, allowing you to create without worrying about topology. So jumping back and forth between both processes is natural while developing your shapes and forms fluidly.
I’ll give an example though since that’s sort of a philosophy of sculpting statement above I can be more specific. Let’s say I use Sculptris to voxelize an area I want a bunch of detail on such as an eyelid or some tight area like that so I can sculpt the duct in. When I’m done sculpting it in Sculptris I’ll have all the detail but have a heavily voxelized area around the corner of the eye. Later on I may want to alter the shape of the overall eye area and then zremesh it to evenly space out the topology.
So if I was to Zremesh the sculpt it would spread out all the polys I used to create the eye/duct area and increase the overall poly count of the final Zremesh. However if I Dynameshed the whole thing first I’d spread polys out over the entire form of the sculpt instead of bunched up in one area, which works much better with Zremesher to start getting some natural topology back to work with.
So you end up bouncing back and forth between both sometimes instead of worrying about bunching up a bunch of polys in one tight area you can spread them out with Dynamesh and use it’s integrated projection to keep the details and when you Zremesh you’re going to have a more understandable and workable (and faster) time of things while you Zremesh.
Basically I use Dynamesh to smooth out all the voxel polys I lay in with Sculptris over my entire form while keeping most of the detail so that when I Zremesh it will be more of a natural process instead of giving me unpredictable results.
By using these processes together you can end up with some really clean auto-generated topology out of Zremesher in the end, from which you can begin finalizing all the forms you created with Sculptris and Dynamesh while making your own work easier by letting the program do the work for you.
That’s how I use it in my workflow and I absolutely rely on both Dynamesh and Sculptris to work together like they do at this point to get the results I expect when I Zremesh. The whole concept to me is one of taking away the concerns of topology from the creator and allowing the program to do the heavy lifting so we can focus on creating instead of vert pushing so much these days and for what it’s worth, it’s never been more close that concept than it is in the current version of Zbrush. They both work together so beautifully these days to give you that freedom of sculpting instead of worrying about edge flow…to the point you can completely ignore topology while sculpting now and just put anything anywhere and triangulate stuff and not worry about quads or anything…just mash it all up…and still end up with something you easily get back down to decent low poly edge flow without much work when that time comes.
In short, if you plan on using Zremesher of your piece during your process you can decrease the thought process behind that phase by using Dynamesh after using Sculptris. Giving your quad strips to work with that are more or less evenly spaced out really helps makes the Zremesher part work more fluidly and take less time computing. Dial in those settings to capture the detail in your dynameshing! (I also use remesh by union a TON in my sculptris work which then really helps to be Dynameshed after for even better volume where parts are attached which again makes the Zremesh process or even retopoing outside of Zbrush just work better for understanding edge flow).