ZBrushCentral

Merging Subtools for 3D Printing

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi all.

I’ve been following a hard surface tutorial where the artist first sculpted his concept cyborg head on a dynawax sphere, and then went on to retopologize different parts of the head, and appending them to the original head as individual subtools. After that, he used the clay-buildup tool to “carve down” the original head to bring out the retopologized parts.

I’ve been following this method closely, but as I intend to 3d print my head sculpts, will the subtools form a watertight mesh if I used “merge down” to merge them all into a single tool?

Do I have to make sure that all the subtools make contact with each other and the original head as well?

Also, I’m concerned that the internal geometry of the original head will create problem for the slicing software. Is there a way to merge everything into a single solid mesh with no internal structures?

Thanks for any advice!

#2

I don’t know about your output process and how it handles non-contiguous (multiple meshes that are not one unbroken mesh) but objects will be “watertight” only if they are arranged in a configuration that makes them watertight (overlapping, no holes, no gaps). If you merge the tools together it simply combines them into a single subtool–they will only be watertight if you have constructed them to be so.

If you need your mesh to be “contiguous” (one unbroken mesh piece with seamless topology), you will need to first combine your subtools into a single subtool, remesh them all together with dynamesh or the subtool menu remesh function, and project the detail from the original mesh in the procedure described below:

http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/3d-modeling/topology/zremesher/transferring-detail/

#3

Thanks so much for the advice Scott! That’s pretty much what I needed to do; create a single, unbroken “skin” or mesh.

I guess I’ll have to add enough skin thickness so that all subtools will overlap with (in other words, “sink through”) the original mesh. I’ll need to carefully smooth down or pare down the details of the original mesh with claybuildup+alt set to a really low Z-Intensity, just enough so that it’s just underneath the surface of each subtool, but still overlapping.

#4

Doing a high resolution dynamesh of it all merged into one sub-tool should be good enough, without any further mesh tweaking needed really (if any crevices are too tight to print, but not touching, the printing resolution will naturally merge them anyways). You can then duplicate that, ZRemesh it, unwrap it, subdivide it and then reproject the details from the dynamesh version so you can export a texture map with your model.