I’m working on retopology for a high-poly model, so that I could get a low-res version since reconstruct subdiv will not work anymore.
I know how to make the retopologized mesh, my question is how do I import it in to my high-res version as the first subdivision level, so that I do not lose my higher detail levels?
Thanks!
you need to project mesh B (new topo) on to mesh A (detailed sculpt)
you can do this right in the retopo tools
simply go to - tool>project>click on project (you must not be viewing the adaptive mesh to turn this button on)
once the button is on, simply step up the number of divisions in the adaptive skin panel.
once you have a similar density on mesh B as mesh A, click on the preview button (a) the new topo with project onto the old topo. Once that is done, click on “make adaptive skin”
if you have already made the low res an adaptive skin you can project meshes in the subtool panel as well.
grab mesh A>append mesh B as a new subtool>divide mesh be to be a similar mesh denisity>store a morph target on Mesh B at it’s highest subD…
tool>subtool>project all
let it do it’s thing. Then check for spikes in the model and push those back with the morph brush. You can try to use the Zproject brush to bring back areas that don’t project well at first, but you may have to resculpt areas that don’t transfer well. (usually the inner eye, corners of the lips, behind the ears, where fingers meet, toes)
I think you have what I am trying to do backwards. If I projected the new topology on to the detailed one, I would be losing ALOT of detail.
I am retopologizing for a low detail mesh, not a high one. I just need to find out how I could import the low-detail as the lowest subdivision level, because I forgot how to do that.
That seems to be how you do it. You don’t project the low level onto the high level, but the high level onto the low level. You can’t just set the topology to the base level unless it has the exact number of polygons and I think the same polygon ‘order’ or whatever it is.
Unfortunately, it never really works right, though. It’s much better to get a good geometry ready before you do your fine detailing. Not necessarily at the beginning, but certainly before you put on the finishing touchs. I learned that the hard way.
If you store a morph target then you can undo some of the areas that fail and get all spikey. Which to me is a bug, there’s just no reason for it to do that.
The other thing you can do is to hide the areas of the high res mesh you know will cause problems. Like the eyes, fingers, etc. That can save some time.
All in all, I see why 99% of the time if people are making game characters they just use zbrush for detailing and make detailed meshes in other apps first. Working from sculpt then retopologizing sounds great but in practice it does seem to be as big of a time saver as I had hoped. I’d actually say the retopology in zbrush is completely worthless, to be honest. I wasted a huge amount of time on with it and eventually just went down to maya and modo and made a base mesh using my sculpt as a reference. Zbrush seems to expect you to work a certain way, and if you step outside of that apparently you’re out of luck.
For a whole character that took me (a very novice modeler) only one day, whereas I spent about two weeks struggling with retopology and attempting to join separate pieces in zbrush.
Well, I’ve done it before I just cant find the tutorial I used again.
I dont remember if it was something with the projection tool, or something you did before extracting the adaptive mesh, or if I imported it while on level 1 of the original model, or what.
But I fairly sure it was not thru subtool-project all…
You can select projection and multi projection when you make an adaptive skin, too. That works a little better and you can control the projection more, but you can run into the same basic issues.
I don’t remember the heading area now but it’s towards the bottom of the tools menu.