ZBrushCentral

Retopology issues for game meshes

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi everyone, I’ve built a model in Maya, sculpted it with clothing, and would now like to retopologise the clothes. For this example, I’ll use the jacket of the character. I took the jacket mesh at level 1 and exported to Maya to optimize for a game mesh, then brought it back into Zbrush to replace the original level 1 jacket mesh.

The only problem is when I subdivide the new jacket mesh, I will get a lot of smoothing in parts I don’t want the smoothing to occur, e.g. the collar, etc. Is there anyway I can get around this? I’ve tried using project all but that seems to cause a few problems too.

I’m still confused on the workflow as I’ve seen some people uv their models before bringing them into Zbrush, while others retopologise when finished sculpting, uv and then bring models back into Zbrush. Is this the correct way to work? Hope this makes sense, thanks for help in advance :slight_smile:

EDIT: Sorry, might help if I give a brief overview of what I mean. Basically I’m wondering what the best way is to keep the form of the mesh exactly the same after creating a new, retopologised mesh to replace it with.

#2

Hai Philly13,

As what I understand from your post is, you have an original mesh created in Maya, then you import it to ZBrush and do some sculpting which most of the time messed up the good topology for a game, then you do retopologize from that Lv.1 mesh, inside of Maya and bring back to ZBrush, but you cannot restore the detail that you previously sculpted, right?..

If so, then what you have to do:

  1. Prepare the high-rez detailed object and the newly retopology low-rez mesh ready inside your tool palette
  2. Select ZSphere and go Tool:Rigging tab then select your high-rez object (Select Mesh)
  3. Go to Tool:Topology tab and select your low-rez object (Select Topo)
  4. Go to Tool:Projection tab and press Projection so that when you press A for skin preview it will automatically “project” your detail onto the low-rez mesh
  5. Go to Tool:Adaptive Skin tab and increase the density slider as you need to capture the detail.

The default setting will work, but sometimes you also need to change and play around with some of the slider/ setting to get a better result.

Hope this will help on your work :slight_smile:

_Revel

#3

I’m still having trouble trying to retopologize my mesh. I don’t see a “rigging” tab in the tool palet or a “topology” tab there either.

Are these plugins??

#4

Those menus are only available when you have the ZSphere tool selected, since ZSpheres are the basis of all retoplogy features.

Please see here: http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Topology

#5

Thanks!