Hi folks,
I have been trying to sculpt on a surface covered with other subtools (anatomy, flesh, veins, lumps of fat tissue, etc)
I am trying to sculpt bulges in the flesh next to the veins so the get embedded a bit.
When i for instance inflate the skin it pops through veins and other subtools.
Is there a way to prevent this ?
Manually painting a mask will be tedious.
Thank you, Kurt
Nobody knows ?
It can’t be done ?
I’m really wondering about this… might be a good wishlist item for Z4R3 :idea:
Sometimes artistry just requires…artistry. Turning on Lazy mouse will help with this, and increase your accuracy. Carefully stroke around the borders of the veins, or use it to paint a quick mask over that section. I personally don’t believe painting a series of quick masks along the areas you want is going to be quite as arduous as you suggest. You dont have to mask out the entire area you want to protect at once, with hyper accurate detail. Just paint quick masks as you go where you’re working, a quick stroke under the edge of the subtool to prevent errant strokes.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can always smooth along the subtool afterwards to sand down any bits that poke through here and there.
So… your answer to my question is: shrug (yes i saw that) artists do it the hard way… ?
I am perfectly aware i can do it the tedious way, vein per vein (all 3000 of them) which is why i was asking if i could generate a base mask to help me save the time on the mindnumbing masking part and put all my efforts into the real ‘artistry’ of sculpting.
In a way you are also suggesting that features like that (projection brush for instance ?) should not be used by real artists…
I’m really not.
For the record I edited out the shrug, because I thought it might be interpreted as me making light of your frustration, but it was meant in more of a “what are you gonna do?” At some point, every artist through the years has just had to bite the bullet and work carefully at some point when doing intricate detail, despite advances in technology.
I did suggest features and techniques that might be helpful to you. As I said, your “chore” doesnt sound that bad to me. I do that sort of thing often, and it doesn’t require the level of masking you seem to think it will. Far easier to smooth down strokes here and there after the fact, than worry about hyper accurate masking. Lazy Mouse in the stroke palette is your friend. Turn the lazy radius up into at least the high teens to increase the lead time and accuracy of the stroke. Make sure you’re working at high enough resolution to be able to make accurate, delicate strokes. Presumably you have a pressure sensitive tablet.
As you see here, Ive made a rough vein like subtool over a sphere of high enough mesh resolution to be able to sculpt fine detail. With lazy mouse on I make some smooth strokes. Notice how Zbrush has a natural aversion to sculpting under subtools, as is evident when I toggle that subtool off, and you can see the gaps in my stroke where it intersected the veins. This is without any masking at all. If I were working with lazy mouse, and zoomed in closely enough on a high resolution mesh, I doubt I would bother masking anything at all. Easier just to smooth down anything that goes amiss. Perhaps your situation is even more delicate, but the same principles apply with even high rez meshes, smaller brushes, and finer detail.
There are textural solutions with alpha masking you could try, to achieve the effect you want with some creativity, but no magic button , Im afraid. You could even start with a texture as a “roadmap”, and paint your vein displacment from that on a single mesh, so you’d always have that texture to derive a mask from. I could devote some time to thinking about your problem for you, but your attitude doesn’t inspire me to expend the effort. I’m sorry I dont have a better answer for you, and Im sorry I was the only one to answer your post.
Good luck with your project.
Ok, heres what I would do to achieve the effect you want.
2)Fill your duplicate vein subtool with Black (color>fill object)
3)Full your body subtool with white the same way.
Merge your duplicate vein and body subtool
Remesh them together as one tool, with MRGB pressed, either with dynamesh, or if you cant get high enough resolution with dynamesh, the resmesh and projection tools in the subtool palette. This will create a new solid mesh with that white and black polypaint intact.
In the masking menu, select “Mask By Intensity”. Voila, your vein area is now masked. ( If you go to the trouble of creating the remeshed object from a low res base mesh with UVs in the subtool menu, you can now save that mask out as an alpha, or save the polypaint as a texture, and reapply that at any time. Otherwise, you always have that polypaint there you can derive a new mask from. Click the paintbrush icon in the subtool palette to toggle polypaint visibility on or off as you work.)
7)Invert that mask. Give it a slight blur.
8)Perform a negative inflate (deformation>inflate) in very small increments. Type the value in manually, at -2 or 3 or so. This will create a negative indentation where you original vein subtool can now sit.
Optional: Invert the mask again, and perform a slight positive inflate, or balloon inflate on the body, aslo at very small increments…1 or 2. This will inflate the body up around the veins slightly, embedding them further.
Otherwise, invert the mask again, toggle visibility to your original vein tool back on, and sculpt as desired on the body mesh.
This shouldn’t be necessary for larger, bulkier overlapping subtools. Sculpting in this program simply isn’t that difficult.
Cheers for researching this and letting me know mate.
I did not know that zb paints less under subtools at higher res.
For now i just did it by painting and alt-painting, tedious and time consuming.
I’ll try your method as well.
Thank you again.
Kurt