ZBrushCentral

Topology & Flow Lab

Thanks to you too Dargelos. :smiley:

OK, here is Mr.SuperAverageMan with Jana’s Testrigg (btw, I think Rigg is the right term , not rig).

EDIT:
Although I stored it already binded, you will have to bind it again after you loaded it.
So load, draw, press Edit and go to Tool -> Rigging and press Bind. Then press Rotate.
Now you can immediately pose the model how you like.:smiley:

Enjoy.:lol:

Very easy rigging. Great rigggg Rastaman! :wink:
Putting it under it’s correct heading right now.

question: I wanted to rotate (twist) the wrist to turn his hand palm faced downwars. How can I do this?

Yes.:smiley:

Scale the view to have the wrist in a good and bigger view from mostly top- or bottom-site , now LMB exactly the micro-zsphere that represents the wrist and drag.
The wrist should now rotate along its length-axis and you can turn the palm up and down (lat.: Supination & Pronation)

Palm_up.jpg

Attachments

Palm_down.jpg

When you pose the model on hands and knees, you will find that some zjoints and zbones will come out of the mesh.
There the binding was not 100%. I think this is a bug to fix in the next update of ZB.
But you can mostly compensate that with a few rotations of the finger-bones.:wink:

A further tip:

if you can’t see the joint in some cases, hover over the area where it should be and click a few times until you catch one zbone or zjoint. then the attached parts will highlighten up and you can easily identify the one you need.:smiley:

Ah, it works! Thanks Rasta, and nice signature. :wink:

Great work and nice rigg. Posing is very easy.

Here’s my tip: I find the Red Wax material is not the best for this sort of work. I like the MatCap White01 as it’s much easier to see what’s going on.

Thanks for the hint, Marcus.
I have already tried some other materials, but I will retry with MatCap White01.

@ Plakkie:
you gave me the idea.:lol: But I will try some other colors for the links so it does not look too much like a copy of yours.:wink:

Posing subtools.

What’s weird is when you bind a mesh, you don’t bind the subtools as well. This alone would make posing easier! But this apparently does no work! ( Please fix this! )

I tried using morph targets, but binding/unbinding the rig would sometimes delete the morph target.

I took a zsphere rig, and added a layer, then did my pose changes. Turning the layer on/off then changed the pose. Binding the zsphere rig then posed the bound mesh when the zsphere layer was turned on.

So it may be possible to pose a mesh w/subtools via a script that applies the zsphere rig with the layer to every tool and subtool.

Very nice, but…

tentacles.jpg

I made the tentacle for a test, but only after trying it on the test octopus-head. No matter what I did, I could not get the head to bind. Even going back to the Zsphere base and generating a new low-poly version and only trying to rig one single tentacle resulted in a crash to desktop at the point of binding. It has to be that the particular topology in the octopus-head is incompatible with the bind algorithm, I would guess. I am willing to donate the octo-head mesh to science if Pixologic needs it.

The tentacle is 1.6 million polys, and it takes about 8 seconds to update each tweak of the rig on my core-duo laptop. (Oops, that was with it running on battery, which means it is not running at even 50% of max speed, probably. I’ll have to try it some more with the laptop plugged in.)

In any case, if working on a full octopus with 1.6 million polys per tentacle, it would probably be best to either use a low-poly model to do final-posing, and then do sculpting, or even mesh-insert the suckers after the tentacles are posed. A fully-detailed octopus is going to be a lot of work no matter what, but at least ZBrush actually gives you all the tools to accomplish such a beast!!

Finally got a chance to play with the new method. Its pretty slick, though I kept it simple rig and wasn’t getting good deformations especially at high poly count. I think it had to do with the micro-zspheres “area of influence” appears smaller or so it seemed on Demo soldier mesh I was practicing on. I did also try it on a high poly sculpted mesh that wasn’t practical to try it on to much wait time for pc to calculate and mesh didn’t hold up at all. I know all meshes aren’t created equal so need to experiment more. I think I might need a more complex rig for this method to work really good. Going to take a look at your model Rastaman to learn what more I should be doing in this method.

I also used different materials… like matcap skeleton and the Flatcolor white material creates good silouette for the body.

Jaycephus-Nice Octopuss, yeah think Transpose is where its at for high poly stuff at the moment. Now if we can get a rig to work at low poly and still keep the high details at highest subdivisions like transpose would be nice. Dunno maybe rigging a low poly and using a displacement map for the details or zproject though never used either of them so no clue if its possible. For the record I really like transpose so far but finding something a lil bit easier for the masses would be nice.

Before this gets lost in the nether, this is something else I found with Crusoes new topology painting… By holding Alt and Shift you can erase the geometry you painted from the underlying ‘rig’. This only erases the topology that was painted on, not any additional stuff you may have drawn.

Thanks to Plakkies zscript I finally found out that the painting works even though the display doesn’t show (on my system) the results of the stroke. After stroking I have to click off and/or rotate the object for the display to update the topology.

Great technique and find Crusoe!

BTW I don’t think the ‘missing topology lines’ problem is necessarily solved because all three methods (upping sdiv, cloning, edit topology toggle) are sometimes not enough in some of my experiences… please don’t bin this discussion, we cant close the case yet!
Thanks to all contributers :+1:

Very nice

OK, currently working with high-poly-models and Convert-to-Main-Toporiggs and compare it with Transpose to see advantages / disadvantages of both methods.

When directly compared, Transpose used for giving your high-poly-models a final position has for me only one real advantage: You pose even very high-poly-models without any major delay. The algorythms for calculating the new position of the mesh are very fast. :+1:
Beside that, I don’t like it so much because I find it hard to get the right point (area) of masking to have really good results when posing. Furthermore it’s nearly impossible to get the same masking back when you want to change a position of let’s say an already posed arm or leg later again.:-1:
So Transpose is ok for adjusting whole meshes, but I really don’t like to use it for giving my models complex and anatomically right positions.
But it is fast.:confused:

Beside that all advantages speak for topo-riggs to pose your models, that’s yet the only big disadvantage ,it has serious delay in displaying your posing-manouvers from about level 3-4 up. It still works within the highest subd-levels, but it’s getting pretty slow compared with transpose.
The same is when you try it with a ‘normal’ zsphere-rigg. Therefore the problem lies in the general programming-procedures that calculates the movements of all zsphere-binded-structures.:confused:
So the big question is now :
Will Pixologic be able to improve and fasten the algorythms for ZSphere-Rigging, especially Topo-Rigging as well as they did for Transpose ?
I suppose that should be the case, because the algorythms for both should be similiar or possible to translate.

So it would be fine if we could get a feedback from Pixologic if they can improve this.:confused:
I ask this because if they can simply do it in the next update, there is no need for me (us) now to search for alternative-way to bypass this lack of speed and we could concentrate on other things.:wink:

Rhumba, thanks for your contribution and kind words! Indeed you can unpaint your painted topology. I found that pressing ALT wasn’t nescesarry, or only the first time. I could erase the topology by just going SHIFT-LMB over it again. Can anyone concur?
In any case I’ll put it in the first post. Thanks Rhumba. :+1:

Quick question:
[attach=61972]helpmp5.jpg[/attach]
I would like to create the inside of the mouth but have no clue how to approuch it.

Any Suggestions?

Attachments

helpmp5.jpg

I could erase the topology by just going SHIFT-LMB over it again. Can anyone concur?
Yes, that’s right.:+1:

Thanks Rasta, always a late night tester around on the Lab. :smiley:
It seems like pressing SHIFT-LMB over a already painted area makes the brush go into erase mode. I updated front and included a new ZScript to show this.
Strange that Zbrush creates to different sets of geometry. You can first click out a new topology, and later paint over it with Shift LMB. In preview you see two layers of geometry, and you can erase them independently. Don’t know if this can be made to serve a purpose…

Sweat topology dreams!
Plakkie