Hello,
how can I subdivide my mesh without shrinking it?
I’m working on a character, which needs to stay lowpoly.
When I’m subdividing it for adding details for normal map, my mesh is shrinking and looking definitely worse.
I think I remember a zBrush script, which made possible to subdive without shrinking.
Thanks for help!
Hello @AlexxCentral
If you wish to disable smoothing entirely, you can disable the SMT button next to the Divide button in the Geometry palette. This will remove the smoothing effect when subdividing. This will result in the mesh being divided to higher resolution, but retaining the faceted appearance of the low poly geometry. This is generally only useful for hard surface meshes without curved components where the faceted look is desirable.
If you are referring to hard edges that are softened by the subdivision process in a mesh that combines smooth curves and hard edges, these edges must be marked by Creasing, or reinforced by additional geometry (two edges very close together are the same as a crease in most cases), in order to keep the edges crisp when subdividing.
If you are referring to the subtle changes a mesh goes through when subdividing for the purpose of texture creation, this is an unavoidable part of the subdivision process. The act of subdiving a mesh will alter the form subtly at all levels of subdivision. This is generally not an issue if you are going to export the altered geometry from ZBrush and apply the maps generated directly to it. However, if you import a mesh, subdivide and export textures from it, those textures will no longer exactly match the original imported geometry. This is why it is necessary to store a morph target and reimport your original unaltered topology immediately prior to generating the textures for it. The process for this is described in the Switch MT section of the MME documentation, as well as here.
Good luck! 
Hi Spyndel,
thanks!
Good to understand better the “MorphTarget” button of the MME 
But in my case it is slightly different:
I would like to alter the Character’s shape slightly, but I do not want it to loose volume by the process of subdividing.
The Volume is perfect, but I would like to sculpt on it wothout putting my character on a diet 
I can see how it becomes unwanted thinner, when I subdivide 5 times.
And I need of course smoothed subdividing for characters.
Question:
Maybe I could after the highres sculpting again reimport the original lowres into SubDiv Level 1 just with “Freeze Subdivision Levels” activated?
Script:
I really remember, that there was a scripted plugin some years ago (not “Nick’s Tools” but similar) which had one button to subdivide a mesh smoothly without loosing volume.
I looked through all my collected scripts but couldn’t find it again.
In case someone knows, please let me know this.
Cheers
Hi Spyndel,
I found after more research a new script now, which I will try next time
The “Cage” button next to the subdivision slider may also be useful for approximating the volume of the pre-subdivided shape. But there is no substitute for storing a morph target and restoring the pre-subdivided mesh prior to generating maps for a piece of external geometry. Some alteration of the mesh’s form is inevitable. Even if you re-import the geometry, just the act of changing subdivision levels will alter it again.
Don’t forget to reinforce delicate areas with additional geometry. A mesh with additional loops reinforcing the curves will shrink less than long, stretched polygons.
The method works fine now.
Actually the Macro script is doing exactly what was already mentioned:
Store Morph Target, then Subdivide with smoothing, then go to back to Subdiv level 1 and switch back to MT.
Hello Spyndel, and thanks for your help. I may want to reactivate this thread because it has been an issue since the first version of ZBrush. Compared to any other softwares (Maya, Max, Mudbox, etc) the subdivision algorithm is not production friendly.
One of the workarounds in production has been to subdivide first and once subdivided export the first or second subdivision as your production base mesh (there are other alternatives with delta blendshapes or to bring the original model to the first subdivision / or reset to a saved morph target a few times.
So many times you may want to make sure that if you subdivide the mesh you don’t lose volume. Just like Mudbox. If I subdivide a geo, without any sculpting information and I go the the first level of subdivision, the base geo retains its original shape. Is this something Zbrush-Maxon will look into it?
Thanks.