ZBrushCentral

Polygon Density -- How to Achieve Clean Render at High Res

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello people,

I just want to say I’m having a great time learning Zbrush and will probably be applying it professionally soon!

Problem: All the 3d work I produce must end up at 4 megapixels minimum. At a certain size things slow down INCREDIBLY! I’m sure this is a basic problem thats easy to overcome. I just want to know how to turn out large resolution images without taxing the computer’s resources too much.

3d Magazine had an art contest submission where the person designed at 5000 pixels square by doing nothing but saving “positions as custom views” then loading them into a higher res canvas. I would love it if this workflow could be explained, or a link to a tutorial on it!

My big battle at present is to create things without visible polygons. It has to be smooth or my images get rejected from stock photo submissions. Is there a way to “smooth” the polys like in traditional 3d software or is there an intelligent way to achieve this in Zbrush? Is smoothness directly dependent on poly density? At large resolutions this is a huge problem.

Thank you! Here is a link to an image where I am experiencing the problem. You can see I tried to blur out some of the problem!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14304964@N05/3139044624/

#2

Suggestions:

Work even denser, perhaps with HD Geometry where aliasing is showing up in the geometry itself.

Double or quadruple the size of your canvas and use the AA-Half button to remove render aliasing.

Render outside of Zbrush in a render that give you a bit more control (my usual solution.)

Meats Meier gives a good tutorial on building “for print illustations” in his DVD set, Zbrush for Illustration. Available here: http://thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/mme03.html

-K

#3

Doubling the size of the canvas before you draw on it and then activating AA Half will do a very nice job of antialiasing your render.

To smooth the model you should also turn off Transform>Quick and then set Tool>Display Properties>DSmooth to 1. This lets ZBrush smooth the model whenever you’re not acting on it. There’s another slider next to that which controls how much smoothing you get. It’s best to leave Quick turned on when sculpting since it speeds up performance, but then always turn it off when you’re going to do a render.

#4

Thanks a lot!