ZBrushCentral

subtools and posing character.. help on procedure..

Hey everyone,

going to attempt re-posing my character model to setup for an illustrative render…

Should I pose my character then create/add subtools like his clothes and jewelery ( nose ring , lip ring , rings on his fingers etc… )

or should I add these to my default posed model before changing its pose…

Never tried it before so im not sure how easy it is to re-pose the subtools along with the base mesh…

any suggestions is greatly appreciated…

basicly im changing the pose of my character from default arms straight out to the sides and legs slightly parted… into a leaned back sitting position

Hands and fingers will go from straight out to one hand fist clenched the other holding a glass of wine…

This might give you an idea what you can do:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=054270

With that Transpose Master, guessing you don't know of it if you did not mention it. What the plug-in does is quickly merge all your subtools as one mesh, at their lowest subdivision, as not to kill your system if they add up to 50 million polygons. From there, you can start posing. You still might pose the body, then pose say the shirt to the new body position, and other items. They should all be in polygroups, so it will be easy to hide and select each element. You can try to pose a leg with both say the leg and pants, but since they are different meshes, the topology selection method won't work, so a lasso selection method might work. And depending on the density of the mesh between the parts, there could be issues with the mask. Then once all is pose, transpose master will trasnfer the changes to the the original tool and into all the subtools. The video of the boxer in the links reallys shows it well.

My first attempt at posing a character had some downsides to this. It wasn’t that easy, and just having the mask not totally right could end up with distortions you might not notice right away.

Here’s what I tried to pose, an image shows the issues I had in the third post where a skin tight arm length glove left behind the real arm and inside of the glove and shows the shoes getting distorted:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=55773

The transposer master was atleast a must despite shortcomings since in the link above the hair, mouth, eyes, eyelashes, eyelids, earings, feathers that were all on the head were subtools. So If I posed the body by itself, it would have been a nightmare to realign all those subtools separatly.