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painting after decimation, impossible? (or very very hard)

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello all,
I’m working on a bust, for some reason (translate: I did not plan ahead being the newbie that I am) I made the head and shirt one object.
Anyway at one point the poly count reach 8 millions… so I decimated down to one million.

Since then I’ve tried painting the model and found that I cannot get a clean or fuzzy or straight line between the head and shirt, as there are triangle shapes sticking up or down from one zone to the other, and there is no way I can paint half of them one colour and the other half another as they are plain triangles.

I’m stuck.
I there a way out of this? I can’t think of anything.
Also: was decimating a bad idea? Is there another choice? (remesh is way above my comprehention at this point)

All info most most welcome.

Cheers! (do I make any sense?)

#2

Ouch! There is a way to get back your clean geometry if you used a base mesh from outside of ZBrush. you can re-import it, subdivide it, and then project the details from the decimated model to the new one.

Decimating your model mid production is usually a bad idea, especially if you’re planning on sculpting, texturing, or animating it later on. You can still texture your decimated model with UV based methods [Projection master and ZAppLink] or other programs like Body Paint.

Hope that helps

#3

Many thanks for your post.
Oops indeed, and no I did not import the mesh :-c
But I’m glad to hear that UV methods are still avaliable to me. I’m going to research that.

You say decimating in mid production is a bad idea (I now agree :lol:) what should I do when I find that one subtool is far too heavy in polygon counts? Too heavy for my system or simply too heavy in terms of logic (like a very basic loooking ring on a hand weighing 2 millions)

Again many thanks!
cheers

#4

You’re welcome!
You can use HD Geometry or split the model into multiple subtools [using polygroups]

Good luck!

#5

I’ll have to redo polygrouping, the decimation erased them!

one more time many thanks