I was wondering if anyone other than myself thinks that having a polygroup handling panel similar to the subtools panel might be a good idea. It would be a little easier to hide polygroups that are inside the main body of the model for example… without having to split the mesh up into subtools. Or has someone possibly developed a zscript with similar functionality.
I love zbrush myself, though rather far from mastering it, but I become more and more familiar with it’s features all the time. Soon maybe I’ll even feel confident enough about my progress to post some sculpts. I just noticed that I get a little frustrated sometimes getting the right polygroups hidden. Luckily storing a morph target and using the morph brush saves me most the time when I goof on hiding the correct polygroup. Still it’d be nice to have slick way to juggle them around like the subtools.
Sadly it is not possible to control polygroups using zscript, and doing what you suggest would mean having names for individual polygroups, something which isn’t currently supported in ZBrush.
One thing that I find helps a lot when working with polygroup visibility is turning on Double in the Tool>Display Properties sub-palette. This makes sure that polys facing away from you are visible, so you don’t miss them when selecting.
Thanks for the reply. It seems to me that Zbrush must use some temporary auto naming internally to track them at all. So, I pretty much think that it has to name them if only as a variable. It could just use auto-generated names, and provide thumbnails and hover-over previews… similar to the default subtool panel behavior. Custom naming might be handy for groups you plan on keeping in the final model, but even just the ability to toggle them independently without custom names would be handy to keep certain portions hidden in an until further notice sort of way.
I do use the double faces, but then there are sometimes many internal pieces and it starts getting tricky isolating just the pieces I want to. Splitting off the polygroups will allow more control, but then sometimes I either lose detail or get holes in the geometry when welding them back together as it seems the boolean operations could use a little improvement in some places.
I’m not bashing ZBrush either, I love it in general, and believe it’s the best sculpting package out there. There might be simpler ones, or a feature here and there that Zbrush doesn’t have, but all in all Zbrush seems the most powerful. I mean I’d love to see it have better control over fibermesh with control curves or something. I’d be a really happy camper if they added a cloth/drapery simulator for subtools… or even better having mesh rigidity editable by polygroup allowing for some pretty awesome control. Those are more wishlist sort of items though, polygroup handling seems pretty basic in comparison… feature improvement as opposed to brand new whiz bang stuff.
I’m also sort of sad it’s still only a 32-bit app… this machine has 16 Gigs of RAM of which ZBrush can only fully utilize 4… So that could make a huge performance difference.
Oh well, sorry to rant. Zbrush is still awesome and performs usually performs faster than 3D-coat which I also own. Too bad I can’t just buy every 3D app out there… lol
(Edited 05-30-13 just to look slightly less uneducated)
Certainly ZBrush keeps track of polygroups internally, though with numbers not names. What you suggest would certainly be possible if it was coded as part of ZBrush, it is just not possible using zscript.
If you split groups into separate subtools then you should crease the geometry edges before subdividing, so that when you reassemble the pieces the edges meet correctly.