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First Zbrush Model, Need some advice on how to do a couple things.(and critiquing)

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

hey fellow zbrushers. i’ve only just began playing with zbrush now that i finally have a tablet. this is my first model. yes i know dragons have been done way too much in zbrush but i thought it would be a good subject to teach myself the tools.

only thing is, when modeling i should have started out with the upper and lower jaws separated. since i didn’t do it this way, is there a way to split the mouth apart? also i modeled the wings without the membrane. is there a efficient way to model the membrane with all the structure that i’ve already built. thank you for your help and ideas!

close up of the head showing how i modeled the mouth. can it be separated?

here’s a shot of how i modeled the wings. i know now that i should have modeled the membrane as the main wing and sculpted down to the bone details. is there a way to model the membrane separate?

thanks again,

Kevin

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#2

It looks good, very well done start of you. My little opinion is the hand is and lower arm comparably small.
The face part, it looks not enough polygon comparably the body, especially cheek, it will be trouble when you do detail part.
In my opinion, you need re-topology and make the polygon group separately upper and lower jaw.
If you don’t want to re-topology, just mask the upper part then move down lower jaw, then delete the inside by hand. But the polygon flow will be messed up.
Anyway, you have a good talent. Very good start !!:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:

#3

thanks for the advice. yea i don’t know how to re-topologize yet. i need to find some good tutorials on that. the hands and feet are ridiculous in the amount of polygons. i wish the polygon count was more unified throughout the model, but alas, i’m still a n00b. i also accidentally deleted the lowest 2 polygon counts at the early stages of modeling, so instead of the geometry subdivisions being “6”, i’m only at a “4”. is there some way to lower the polygon count in the hands and wings like decimation master or something? thanks again.

#4

for the membrane look into curvesurface brush (zbrush.info for more details) , it allows you to draw lines on the bones of the wings you made and it will create a surface in between those bones. The thickness of it determined by draw size of the brush. for the jaw , you could try some masking , then coloring the model in 2 colors , top and bottom jaw and then create polygroups from colors. This will allow you to select the jaw more easily in the future to move it. if you were using dynamesh , cleaning up the inside of the mouth would be easier, but using dynamesh now will probably lose you some detail you already added.

Decimation master only works on the whole model i believe. So there’s no real way to do this without probably having visual seems. (you could slice off the feet , make them seperate subtools , decimate them, but thats where i think you will notice a slight seam, it might be acceptable if the moddle will remain in zbrush, but you wont be able to connect them back to the body in a decent way without dynamesh.

#5

thanks for the advice Namek! even if the jaws are two polygroups, how could i split it? So as far as polygon count on the hands and wings i’m pretty much screwed right?

#6

Cant wait to see the wings. love the toes on the critter too. are you going to scale up the body or is it going to be smooth skin one?

#7

naw, he’s gonna be all kinds of scaley! just tryin to get the base model where i’m happy. it will be similar to an iguana around the neck and head, and traditional dragon type scales on the body. thanks for the kind words!

#8

ok another idea for the jaw. mask off the jaw as good as possible , invert the mask , use move tool to drag the jaw down quite a bit. this will stretch the polys and probably not really leave a mouth but instad a block of polys, clear the mask after. then use rectangular clipping brush on whatever was created between top and bottom jaw after dragging it down to cut out a space. you will need to redo , fix the moddeling of that area a bit again , but if you create polygroups after this , you will be able to close and open the mouth with transpose rotate .

#9

yea that’s a damn good idea! and i understand it, lol. thanks Namek. also, just watched the z classroom video on curve surface brush, AMAZING idea yet again. but it says i can’t have any subdivisions to use it. does that mean i have to finish the model completely to where i’m happy with it before i create the wings? i have to delete the lower subdivisions right?

#10

didnt know about the sub levels, maybe duplicate your model , delete subdivs on the duplicate and create the membrane on that one. then delete the duplicate again. if the membrane is created on the model and not as a subtool, maybe you can click it with ctrl alt in visibility selection mode to just show the membrane and then delete hidden

#11

clipping rectangle on the poly’s between the jaw seems to distort the whole model rather than deleting them. guess i just don’t get how it works.
check this out! watch the slice curve brush video, can i use that brush for separating the jaws? but it would create separate pieces, so i don’t know if that’s what i want to do. pretty slick though!
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161537-ZBrush-4R2-ZClassroom-Movies-Updated-to-include-17-Movies

#12

am i on the right track?

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now i just need to figure out how to go from here

#13

Yes, you are on the right track. Now, one simple way to do it is to mask the part between the upper and lower part of the mouth, invert the mask, and just use transpose move or sculpting brushes to push it into the head. Then you’ll have a open mouth. If the polygons are too stretched out and you run into problems, you can try dropping down a few subdivision levels and smooth out the stretched area, then use the “Reproject Higher Subdiv” button in the subtool menu to reproject all the details on the higher subdivision level.

#14

thanks shulin! i’ll give it a try. i wasn’t having luck earlier cause like you said the polygons were getting all screwy and i didn’t know what to do from there. i’ll give what you suggested a try and post progress. thanks again!

#15

Great start mate - Will keep an eye on your process mate!
Cheers and lets keep on going.
Kenny:)

#16

ok zbrush masters, i need some help. i got to this point, and i pushed the mesh in, but there’s no way i can figure out how to get the geometry to cooperate. i can’t smooth cause all the geometry just pops back out. so any ideas?
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where should i go from here? what method should i try? i wish i could just delete that geometry somehow. also i made the lower jaw a separate polygroup, but i can’t figure out how to move the jaw back when i’m done. is there a way to select that one polygroup and transpose it back?

#17

could you put a file available of your dragon maybe, it might be easier to figure out how to help you with this by trying out some stuff on thr model myself.

#18

yea no problem Namek. thanks a bunch.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7597969/Zbrush/Dragonmouth.ZTL

let me know if that doesn’t download for you, or if you want the model that i saved before masking and opening the mouth.

#19

ok it worked, the bad news is that i had to sacrifice the highest level of subdivision , but when checking between level 3 and 4, there wasnt much difference. The really good news now though , is that instead of your 4 million polys for your 3rd subdivision level, you now have 150.000 instead. so you still have 95% of the detail and able to subdivide 4-5 times more.

I did it by loading in your model twice , on one of them i baked the layer you had for technical reasons. Removed highest subvid. Converted it into a 1024 resolution dynamesh , fixed the mouth area and remeshed it. Then I took the original , also deleted the highest subdiv , inserted it as subtool with the dynamesh version i made , and projected the detail from the original onto the dynameshed one. Leaving you with an evenly poly distributed version and a lot less polys too.

if you subdivide this one 4 times , you’ll still be under your 16 mil polys and i checked , you can even model detailed teeth on the model itself, so you’ll have a lot of polygons to play with.
here’s the download
https://rapidshare.com/files/64873376/Dragonmouth2.zip

184.000 polys, as you can see some detail loss, but i dont think you’ll have much trouble adding it again + more.

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#20

Wow man I’m speechless. Words cannot describe my gratitude. I’ve spent 2 days of playing and Google searching trying to figure this out. I only just started messing with dynamesh the other day and didn’t even realize you can convert to dynamesh. Thanks for taking time out of your day to fix my model and explain your process to me. Now I just have to teach myself how you did it. You figure out that process yourself or learn that from a tutorial? Thanks again Namek!!