ZBrushCentral

two seperate pieces of geo, blended seamlessly?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi, Does anyone have experience taking two seperate pieces of geo, creating displacent maps for each, and then blending them together seamlessly at render time?

I am working on a project where someone has tentacles protruding from their head, and i need to have the objects coming out of his head seperate geo from the head itself (picture 10 or 15 really detailed tentacles growing out of a human head).

I need the tentacles to be seperate geo from the head geo, otherwise I won’t be able to subdivide the entire mesh enough (with tentacles merged to the head it will easily hit 4 million polys before i can to sculpt the fine details)

I am doing some R & D right now, modeled the tentacle protruding from the head in maya as one mesh, then seperate the geo along one edgeloop, sculpting in zbrush each piece. Maybe I am approaching this all wrong and someone has abetter solution, im all ears!

Thanks,

-D

geoquest.jpg

Attachments

geoquest_inzbrush.jpg

#2

You either need to weld the two groups (which can be done during export from Maya or during import into ZBrush) or import the mesh into ZBrush and then press Tool>Geometry>Crease.

The Crease option is probably the least ideal option in this case, though. Welding points will allow the join between the two meshes to smooth when the object is subdivided. If you crease, it won’t pull apart anymore but a line will become visible.

#3

Aurick,

Like I mentioned above, I do not want to weld/combine the pieces together because zbrush/my computer at this point could not handle the amount of polys (10-12 million plus) the total mesh would subdivide to. I will try out the crease technique you mentioned.

Thanks

#4

Personally I would weld the two parts and model within my polygon limit. Then when more polygons are needed separate the model and subdivide some more.

You can separate the model by hiding parts of the model and pressing Tool > Geometry > Delete Hidden. To avoid the smoothing Delete Hidden applies you can mask the highest (important!) subdivision level before deleting.

The only problem I can see with the above process is changing UVs after seperating the model. I am not sure if the vertice order will change. That does not matter of course if you export out level 1 of the separated model, UV in another program and import back again.

#5

TVEYES,
I like your approach. I will definetely try your technique. I will post some results on here once I do it. Once the next version of zbrush comes out then My question will pretty much be moot because of the new polygon limits.

Thanks again,

  • D
#6

For more information on this workflow take a look at Tony Jung’s Making of Lord of Darkness. However, the method he uses to split the model is an old way of doing it, Bingo_Jackson came up with the masking idea I described in my previous post and which you should use instead.

Looking forward to see what you come up with.