ZBrushCentral

Local subdivisions

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Gidday all,

I just started working with Zbrush again after a while and I bought a book by Scott Spencer(Zbrush character creation). The book has some nice tutorials but I ran into a little problem doing the a human head sculpture tutorial in the book.

Thing is, I nearly finished the head model and now I need to start to smooth the surface, sadly though most of the polygons are located in the skull not the face. The model has over 6 million polygons but still when I smooth the face, it starts to look ugly in that area area because of the lack of polygons there.

I was wondering if there a way to locally reduce the number of polygons in the skull area and of course locally add more to the face?

I have tried doing this by hiding parts of the head and then deleting/adding division levels but it doesn’t seem to work, I am left with only 1 division level when I do that. Maybe I am doing something wrong?

So if anyone can help me out here a bit, I’d appreciate it :slight_smile:
Thanks!

#2

You can go to level 1, hide all but the face, and divide the mesh. This will divide only the visible part. The problem is that it will also create triangles where the two densities meet, which don’t smooth so well. You’re likely to get some obvious problems.

Another approach is to use retopology to adjust the mesh so that there are more polys where you need them. Then you can project the details (using Tool>SubTool>Project All) from the original version to the new one.

Or you could hide all but the face and use Tool>SubTool>Split to split the face off to a separate SubTool. You can then divide the face without affecting the rest of the head.

#3

Ok thanks a bunch, I will play around with some of the solutions you mentioned.

Although I can’t find the retopology option in the tool menu. The help files say it should be there, but I don’t see it.(yes I am a newb :P)