Zbrush 3 was released 6 years ago, ZB4 steadily nearing 4 (with several R# releases to fill out the years). I hope this school doesn’t charge you tuition, because I can’t see why they’d chose to train students to use such outdated software (especially when updates are free).
Do you always need to restructure your mesh (remake topology right?) after doing high-rez texture?
This depends on your workflow and terminology.
If you polypainted on a dense mesh and its topology was built around sculpting and polypainting (almost entirely made from evenly-spaced quads) instead of having animation-friendly edgeloops, then you’ll need to make a version of the mesh that suits your end needs (the edgeflow for animation, a polygon budget if its meant for games, etc).
If you started from a mesh that already worked well for animation/gaming/whatever and you were still able to subdivide it and sculpt or paint on it happily in zbrush, then you won’t have to retopologize.
I am still confused about the difference between projection master and uv master, can help me on that please ?
UV master is an automated process that creates UVs for a model (does it even work in v3?). UVs basically give every vertex a specific coordinate, so that when any image is applied as a texture, the 3d program would say “this portion of the image will get displayed on this polygon, and that potion of the image will get displayed on that polygon, etc”
Projection Master is something entirely different, and revolves around understanding zbrush’s 2.5D “pixol” concept. Using it basically takes a 2.5D snapshot of your document (like a pinscreen where each pin is a pixol on your document/screen), lets you paint on some color and depth detail to this 2.5D image, and then when you’re done, attempts to project the result back onto your actual 3d mesh.
Also, when I was trying that before, I always got seams problem on my model. If i was applying only color, I didn’t had much trouble but when I tried to do some relief, I was able to strongly see the seams, any idea?
It could depend on the nature of the seams. If its a massive problem and nothing looks at all the way it should, then you just need to flip the image or the UVs. On the other hand if the texture looks largely correct on the model and just has a finer visual error around the seams, then you probably just need some more edge padding. The steps to add padding vary depending on which program you’re using to bake your polypaint to a texture, but generally it’s found along with the baking options. I’m not sure where to point you towards as the steps involved (the menu options, button locations, and the entire baking process itself) has changed in zbrush since v3. You could look into using xnormal for your baking needs instead, possibly Max if it can handle polypaint data and a massive number of verts-per-model), or try the xnormal dilation plugin (or something similar) on the texture itself in a program like photoshop.
Second thing is, I remember in previous class the teacher said it was impossible to dig a hole in zbrush 3 (wanted to make a torn skirt). Was it true and if yes, can you do it in newest zbrush without modeling the skirt with holes in 3ds max or maya before ?
It would be a lot harder to do in one of the outdated versions of zbrush; you’d essentially have to use zspheres to retopologize the mesh to support the holes, or just paint them black if the end goal supports an alpha map instead of volumetric geometry. You might be able to get away with masking everything but the holes and extracting it into a new mesh; my memory of v3 is too foggy to remember what it was capable of.
In the newer versions of zbrush, holes can be done much easier.
