ZBrushCentral

Making a mess of mesh and making mesh a mess

Hi everyone. As a noob confronted with all the different mesh options, I’m a little lost and the tutorials I’ve seen haven’t dealt with this enough to help me. When should you choose standard subdivisions? When should you go dynamesh? When is the Remesher better? When is Dynamic Subdivisions better? When should you just retopologize manually?

The reason I ask is that I saw a tutorial where this guy made this awesome shiny breast plate with pointy extrudes and he retopologized because he was concerned about the edge loops. And I’m like, that’s a consideration I wouldn’t have had. (Again, I’m a noob.) What other considerations out there should I be taking into account.

Let me be more specific now. I have a DAZ Genesis 2 model that I’m making clothes for by extraction. The bell bottoms and t-shirt are easy. But the vest is hard because the edges are all scrunkly from polygons that got extracted that made the edges too rough. There’s issues with the genesis 2 figure’s mesh that make me not want to subdivide more to make the mask more precise but I figured I could deal with it when extracted and I can subdivide more and do other stuff then.

Boy was I wrong. The inner edges of the vest flare towards each other in one place and flare out in another. I want the inner edge of the vest to go straight down. I’m going to have to basically smooth it out and I’m thinking there’s a smarter way. And I’m pretty sure my error took place early in the workflow, perhaps before I even extracted.

So I guess what I’m looking for is very very basic wisdom. When I approach a mesh and have something specific in mind, what should I be asking myself? What should I be looking for? And from that what specific tools should I be thinking about. There’s a calculus here. I just don’t get it yet.

Oh and I’m mainly talking about organic modeling. Hard surface is a whole other kettle of mesh.

To get rid of rough edges when extracting clothing, use the Smooth Groups Brush. First duplicate the Genesis model, then mask out the pants or top or whatever it is you want to make. Ctrl+W to make the masked part a new polygroup. Now go the the Brushes>Smooth folder and select the Smooth Groups Brush and run it around the edges of the polygroup at a low strength setting. When you extract your clothing item, the edges will be perfectly sharp.

I just remembered another way to get sharp extractions from your masks. When you do the masking, go to Geometry>Edgeloops and click “Edgeloop Masked Border” and that’s it.