Hi guys,
Long time since I’ve posted new ZBrush tutorials, but I ran into a situation last night where I went a little too far experimenting with sculpting and polypainting on a mesh that didn’t have workable topology or UVs, and couldn’t reconstruct lower subdivisions to get back to my base cage.
It could have been an error in the original mesh’s geometry, I could have had a spot of mask somewhere when I hit subdivide… regardless, I had a pretty fully formed concept that I was ready to take to the next level, and I didn’t feel like recreating it from scratch.
After a couple hours of Googling and combing ZBC, I found enough bits and pieces to scrape together a solution for my issue – but that’s only half the battle, and I thought it’d be helpful to everyone out there on how to fix this issue that you’re going to run into eventually, easily, with minimal compromise.
Reconstructing a high res mesh on a new mesh, or debugged basemesh is fairly straightforward – even recovering very fine detail and polypainting information. The real trick is to take it very slowly with a methodical workflow, which I’ve recorded out into this lesson, along with a little bit of how I got got into that situation.
Long story short… you know that folder of basemesh downloads you’ve been hoarding? Lots of 'em stink and have the ability to mangle your .ztl file after you’ve spent a ton of time on it. It’s not only poorly topoed meshes – you can also get into this situation by making a few wrong turns in ZBrush itself (like leaving invisible spots of masking on the model when you subdivide).
At any rate, this video covers how to get your sculpt and paint onto new geometry. It doesn’t have to be anywhere near the original geometry, so this workflow is applicable to retopologizing a model as well. In essence, it’s really a retopo workflow that just happens to really help fix broken meshes.
There’s a second segment going up ishortly that’s more Maya->ZBrush->Maya worflow with multiple, clean UVs, showing how I cleaned up the model and got it to a workable state for actual production. That segment is heavily Maya-centric, and the main focus of this piece is really whatever app you use plus ZBrush.
One note: the model in question has nudity (well, a topless female monster, at any rate) as I hadn’t gotten around to the clothing just yet, so if you’re offended by such things, this might not be the tutorial for you. It just happens to be the state the model was in when I realized that my lower sub-d levels were corrupt.
Thanks for looking, and let me know what you think!
http://www.treyharrell.com/tutes-2009/medretopo-pt1/
Approx. 30 minutes, Flash format