what is the best way to mask straight lines, I am trying to mask a foot to make a shoe. what are the best setting to mask a clear line, and not have fuzzy edges?
To increase the resolution of your masks you need to increase the resolution of your 3D model.
In Zbrush your 3D model is referred to as a ztool.
So what you do is go to your tools palette which should be the main set of tools on the right hand side and click on geometry.
From there you can subdivide your model or “ztool.”
Subdivide all the way up to the max that your computer system can handle and then you will be able to make nice crisp masks.
Also too, you can make a nice crisply edged sub tool from a not so sharp mask by using the extract command that is found in the sub tools options.
Here’s how that works. Let’s say you wanted to make A SHOE! HAHAHA! =D Well you mask your foot in the shape of the shoe you want, it doesn’t have to be a sharp mask, then you go to the sub tool menu found at the top of of the tools palette and click the extract button.
After Zbrush computes the request you’ll then see a new sub tool appear in your sub tool list that is your shoe.
Wait, try this first. Load in the demo soldier. He’s a ztool 3D model that comes with Zbrush.
Look at his glove. See that? That was made with that extract command. In fact, his boots, clothes, bracelets, goggles, back pack, etc. were all made by extracting the items from the body.
Now look at that glove again. See how it has nice sharp edges? Well that sharpness comes from the edge smoothness control in the extract command. The way it does it is, it makes triangles here and there out the edge of the mask thereby making the result crisper.
But wait! that’s not all! =D
Zbrush can do things that will amaze you as you get into it. Like projecting the image of an actual photo of a shoe and transferring those details to the surface of your model as a relief in polygons!
You’ll see. =)
Hope this helps.
Love it, the way you explained, I had an idea that higher resolution was the way to go, but was not sure if I can lower the res back to a 3 to bring it into LW, as I do not want to overload my model…
Yes and you can go back to a lower subdivision after making details on a higher subdivision and those details will be duplicated as much as possible in the lower. Kind of like decimation.
So in other words, lets say you want a low resolution model of something like a shoe and you want to show shoe laces or buckles or other details, but you want those details to be as low resolution representations, you can ether make those details polygon by polygon in software like LW, or you can sculpt high res details in Zbrush and then just switch back to a lower subdivision to get the low resolution version.
From there you can import the low resolution subdivision model into LW to do vertex, face and edge tweaking to get things just right.
=)