Hello community,
I am failry new to Zbrush. I come from a traditional sculpting background with putty and clay. As a result I fell in love with Zbrush.
I recently bought Zbrush and am trying to get really into it. I have watched a few tutorials and thanks to those tutorials I was able to build a nice hard surface sculpt/vehicle inteded for 3d printing. As it is supposed to be a printed model kit in the end it is made up of 11 single parts to make it castable. Each of these parts at the moment consist of several subtools that were merged together, a few of them with quite a high polycount.
The subtools are basically just geometric shapes with a few curves and cut-outs made with the dynamesh substract function and the deformation tab and the clipping tools. To get several clean cuts the polycount was set quite high. I have added some stuff that came in the insert brushes for techy details here and there on several of the subtools. Then I merged subtools together to have groups of actual parts I want to print in the end. Now that I finished designing the vehicle I wanted to export it. And here my problems begin. I have made sure all the parts are interlapping( is that even a word ?), when trying to dynamesh the whole thing though, I loose a lot of detail on the separate subtools or Zbrush crashes. I merged all subtools down to 11 final subtools that are supposed to be the parts of the final model kit I want to build. The problem is the poly count is way to high.
I have tryed using the decimation master to reduce the polycount, which worked quite fine on most of the parts, on others it caused havoc or caused problems with the detailwork and/or made holes into the surface. Mesh integrity tests were successful on all subtools, and yet I still get a loooot of errors when I export it into an .stl file. Lots of open edges and shells etc. But how and why?
What is the most intelligent approach to this? I got that designing part figured out till the point that I can build a model that looks nice enough to me, but causes chaos when I try to make it export ready. Do I have to make sure everything is a dynamesh? if so, is there a way to keep the detail and sharp edges I sculpted when dynameshing + the parts that are insertbrush like rivets and alike? Zremesher didn’t really work either without a mayor loss of detail or getting soft edges.
I have printed organic stuff before but those sculpts had way less polygons and were made up of just one subtool in the end.
Please help!
I hope I have been able to describe my problems, sry for my bad english.
If you could refer me to some tutorial that might cover the problems I mentioned that would help too. I have seen the 3d printing tutorial here in the Zclassroom and understood everything this far, so I am a bit confused as to what is actually causing the problem ( apart from the insane polycount ) as I have tryed doing just what was done in the vid…