ZBrushCentral

Nail on the base mesh or not?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Iv had problems with creating nails as proper geometry for my Base mesh for use in Zbrush, they end up folding up and producing a realy bad nail due to smoothing . I know I can just sculpt them in, but realy wanted to have the nails seperate on my Uvs, whats the best workflow for this?

A: Build the nails on the base, dont sculpt or smooth them in ZB.
B: Build nails as seperate geomery, the merge the nails with the base mesh later.
c: Sculpt the nails at a high sub d level.

These are the only ways I can think of.

Thanks.

#2

I think this would depend on what best suits your workflow and requirements.

A. Building at base level would work - you could crease the nails, perhaps by using polygroups, and preserve their shapes that way. This would be ok for a small number of nails and make UV creation straightforward.

B. You can only do this if both your mesh and nails have no subdivision levels, or the same number of levels. The MeshInsert brushes are good for this but they won’t work with subdivision levels. Positioning after using Tool>Geometry>InsertMesh would be tedious for more than a few nails.

C. This would be possible but might cause polygon stretching if the nails are proud of the mesh surface.

#3

Thanks for your help.

The crease sounds intersting, will try that. I had done a quick test and found that making a nail, and placing each nail on each finger slightly inbedded into the mesh.

I then exported the whole mesh with nails in place, and Zbrush automaticly creates a polygroup for the nails. I sellect and show only nails mask all, then bring the whole mesh back. At a higher sib d level I sculpt into the nail bed untill the nail apears, this seems to produce clean results. The crease option sounds good as I can add a few more loops at the nail bed area to hold a tight edge for the nail to sit into.

Thanks.

#4

I thought you meant nails as in hammer-and-nails! :slight_smile:

Still, your technique sounds good.

#5

Thanks, brought a smile to my face. :lol: