Good writeup and mirrors my own exploration into the new Zremesher experience. It’s a must to guide it properly but when you take the time to do so you enjoy the fruits of your labor in such a clean and most importantly, consistent, way. I still retopo everything by hand though in the end haha but this will get you to a good place for further zbrush shenanigans in no time and the results are phenomenal for what it’s trying to be. It integrates beautifully with the new snapshot modeling functionality and boolean workflow that the team here has been working on. At this point after a few days of heavy experimentation I can say without hesitation that all of this new stuff put together and working together as it does now, has opened my mind to brand new approaches to modeling and that’s not the easiest thing to with someone whose been at this for this long. At this point already I’m subtracting my main mesh from booleans I generate in snapshot and intersecting and boolean meshing all of that and then subtracting other booleans from that and appending it all and subtracting and duplicating and everything wonderful along those lines and not worrying for a second about topology since it’s so easy to get back to clean line/hard edge when all is done.
The really beautiful thing about this is the freedom and for once I feel, for the first time actually, that I can safely use all of zbrushes power in my modeling and throw everything it has to offer at my sculpting process without fear of breaking things and wasting my own time. Clip brushes and trim brushes are no longer something to be avoided out of topology concerns and the amount of work required to clean up results now I can force my will on my meshes and do whatever comes to mind as it comes to mind and never once consider what the repercussions of that action will be as I know I can now literally brute force my way out of any corner I find myself in, all within zbrush itself. If they were going for a “clay” like experience all this time, it’s here. Yesterday I needed a perfect square polygroup for panel lines on an elaborately intricate mesh. I didn’t have to puzzle it out I simply sliced new polygroups into my entire model using the slice curve and and created my own topology, my way, on the fly to use as I wanted to and then subtracted it from my mesh instantly for perfectly clean lines and the boolean meshed everything and zremeshed the results and it came out better than I could have believed. The power in this is not to be slept on! I do this in clay/way sculpting, making broad sweeping changes mid sculpt without concern or care, and it’s absolutely liberating to now, finally, be able to do so here.
I usually don’t make a big deal about these things as I use so many applications for so many things in tandem and none of this is “new” per se, but Zbrush is now unified their own systems in their own design approach and it’s something to be excited about and I think many people are going to open their eyes to new possibilities now. It’s not very often I get to say I’ve been offered the chance to think about 3d modeling differently and with a new perspective.
Thanks for the writeup and video and I encourage anyone to explore all of this and master it, if they are concerned with time savings at all in their own work.
