ZBrushCentral

handling body-parts

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello fellow board-members :slight_smile: ,

finally finishing my first decent (!) character in Maya I want to carry on with sculpting.
There is just one thing I couldnt figure out yet.

Is there a way to divide a body part at a fairly high level, sculpt and move to the other parts doing the same without seams?

I thought that would have been questioned quiet a few times, but no keyword in any combination brought up anything usefull
(zbrush body parts seams displacement…).

Any tutorial Ive found is about a head or the full body but nothing about handling multiple parts of 1 mesh.

I am at the point that I layed out the uvs and moved the parts with +/- 1 in u- or v-direction so that, if it comes to painting, every body-part has its own space. Importet the mesh to zbrush and made uv-groups.

Problem:
When I smooth the parts it will of course smooth the borders.
Is there no other way than the crease-tool?
What about the distribution of the polygons and the hard edges?
And of course: What about the seams?

Regarding the seams I think it would be no problem to sculpt 1 part, export, import the in-between, sculpt export, import part 2. But I guess it will be a pain in the…well, lets say you cant call it work"flow".

Any hint would be really great.

#2

This told us how to do this a long time ago. The images no longer seem to be there, but the message is still recognisable.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=200732&page=1&pp=15

The basic idea is that you model away on the full mesh figure at the highest level you can manage. When you are ready to go one more level up, but can’t cope with the poly count you duplicate the tool as many times as you are going to chop it apart. Each chopped up section needs to have a few poly loops belonging to the adjacent parts, so that the level-up auto smoothing doesn’t affect the seam.

Then you model away on each part at the higher level; and combine the displacement maps in the renderer’s material shader. Normal map parts can be glued together in Photoshop, but 32 bit displacement maps don’t like being edited!

Cheers,

R

#3

Hi,
not exactly what you’re looking for,but related
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=61676&page=1