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Retopologising and Existing Mesh another problem with the solution

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

hey guys!! i ´m having a problem hope you can give me a hand:

i made a female figure with zbrush, i´m happy with most of the mesh but i have a small problem with the chest to be more specific with the shape of the breasts, i don´t like how the polygons are distributed there, now the easier way to fix it would be with re topology, but i don´t want to do it with the whole figure just a small part ( the breasts only) i found this tutorial which pretty much answers my problem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdXqMU05t58&feature=related

everything was great but one detail: when i go to the select topo option from the tool>topology menu (minute 4:49 in the tutorial) zbrush tells me that i can´t do this with a mesh that has more than 15,000 polygons, my figure has more that 15,000 even at the lowest level. I tried to do it deleting additional parts of the figure but i ended with virtually the head only, so this didn´t work because that´s exactly what i was trying to avoid.
So i want to know is there another way to edit only a part of the topology from a mesh??? can i fix the 15,000 restriction?

thanks guys!!!

#2

go to your lowest subD level.
delete everything but what you want to retopo. Keep the border polygons intact as well (for reference of where you have edges/verts).
Retopo the breasts.
Now take your lowpoly mesh and delete the inverse of what you did for the first part.
you should now have 2 meshes perfectly link up.
you can merge and weld these two meshes together inside of zbrush now.
subD the mesh up to the previous level and project the mesh back onto the old highpoly.

Edit* If your verts don’t line up perfectly they wont merge together, you can use the pinch brush to pull these verts together so they sit on top of one another, then try the merge again.

hope that helps.

#3

hey dude!! i tried your method and it works pretty good. However i still have a problem when i go to my lowpoly mesh and delete the inverse of what I did for the first part. How can i select exactly what i delete in the other one??? do i have to do it by hand as close as i can and then move the polygons to match as close as possible to the part that i´m going to weld???

thanks!

#4

you can make use of polygroups, masking and the Grow command in visibily. I would set up one polygroup for the main part, another for the breasts, and another for the “overlapping” polygons.

You are going to have to select them by hand, but that isn’t that difficult if you’re using polygroups and masking to set up your polygroups.

hope that helps.