Hi,
I think you can smooth your low poly object but I cannot find the function anymore.
Is it still possible to do that?
Having a low poly object that is not faceted?
I know using this make calculation higher, because it’s like subdividing it, but I want to stay on a low poly stage and having it smoothed.
I will never subdivide my mesh, so I can handle the calculation.
You can switch off “Quick 3d edit” in the Tranform Palette to see smoothing applied, but you cannot edit your mesh while it is off. I seem to recall you once could, but the performance impact was so great you’d never want to. Likewise you can see smoothing at rendertime using BPR, if you enable “Smooth Normals”, although i know this is not what you want.
Thank you Spyndel once again 
But yes, what I’d love is a realtime and editable object with smoothed normal.
I thought it was possible.
And I just want to use it with object with no more than 10-12k polygons.
At the moment it is with an 5k polys object.
I remember reading that when using smoothed normal it was like subdividing mesh, and it was like increasing mesh density by a factor 4.
I can easily handle millions polys object, so these little object should behave correctly even with smoothed normals.
Zbrush actually handles millions of polygons in real time far easier than it does that smoothing effect, which is why it’s rarely an issue.
From what you’ve said here and in your other thread, it sounds like you’re trying to use Zbrush in a rather “un-zbrushy” fashion. It might be helpful to know more about what you’re trying to do, so we could tell you the best Zbrush way to go about it. If you want to directly edit a low poly mesh on a polygon by polygon basis, there might be tools aimed more at that sort of thing than Zbrush is.
I’m using it for modeling blendshapes
But I don’t want to subdivide my base head, I want it to support all my deformation without subdividing it.
I use an head of 6k polygons, but I’d love to see a smoothed version of it without having to subdivide it.
Zbrush sculpting tools are far more powerful than maya artisan that’s why I am using it, and it give me much more control than maya to do the job.
The question I asked was just a little plus that could help me even more.
Currently I’m modeling my shape as they are with unsmoothed normal, but I’d love to have it smoothed because it gives you a better view of the final shape.
Ok, in that case, here are a few simple tips that might be helpful.
Turn on Polyframe for your low res object. Now leave it on, as you subdivide your object. As long as you don’t turn off the polyframe and back on, it will stay as the low poly wire even on the smooth high poly mesh. If you turn it off, just go back down to the lowest subd level, and turn it back on before moving back up.
Go in to Preferences>Draw>Pfill, and turn that to zero. This gets rid of any polygroup shading, leaving clean wires. You can also adjust Pframe opacity while you’re there, to make the wire less obtrusive.
That way, you can work on a smoothed wire version of your low poly cage, and still see where those wires are ending up on the low poly mesh once its smoothed. A material like Matcap white might work better for the visibility of this process than red wax.
Topological masking in the Brush>Auto masking menu might be helpful for doing things like facial expressions and mouth positions without disturbing nearby features.
And you can still just export out the low poly mesh when you’re done. If youre worried about subtle changes in the low poly mesh from the subD process, store a morph target first, which will give you options for restoring that form minus whatever deliberate changes you made. Or you could approximate it with the “Cage” feature.
Sculpting Layers are probably a great, non-destructive way to try out different expressions.
Sorry I couldnt be of more help.
Thank you, Spyndel.
But if I don’t want to subdivide it’s because I won’t use driven displacement.
Your tricks seems correct but it is not because you are still adding extra geometry, and if I am able to do little wrinkle around the nose for example, my base geometry won’t be able to if it doesn’t have the proper geometry already there.
That’s why I don’t want to subdivide, I really want to see my base mesh behaving the way it does.
That’s what I will have in my final blend shape.
If I can’t have smoothed normals, I will continue without it, that would just be nice to have them.
I was checking a feature on maya just to see if it could be applied here.
In maya you can have a smoothed preview of your lowrez mesh, it’s called High Quality Display and you get it by pressing the 3 key by default.
What it does is subdividing your mesh and let you see a subdivided version of your mesh.
But, what it great about it, is that you are only affecting your base mesh.
Even if it is creating more polygons, these polygons are only used for display purpose.
For editing it use the vertices on your base mesh.
For example if you create a cube and use this display function you will get a sphere because of the subdivision.
But you will only have 6 vertices to edit, if you stroke on area that create the bulge you won’t be able to move it at all because your base mesh doesn’t have the required vertices.
And what is even greater is that you can choose the level of subdivision to display, coarse or finer, by pressing page up and down.
That could be a good workaround.
At least for blend shape editing, for game it is not the same issue.
Edit: After thinking about it, what I am talking about is just a basic subdivision surface editing
That would be great to have this in Zbrush too.
And after reading Silo manual they made the exact same description I did =)
If you assigned a hotkey to the Transform>Quick Edit button you could quickly turn it on and off to view your mesh with smoothing any time you want. You need to set things up in the Tool>Display Properties menu:
Although previous versions of ZBrush allowed sculpting with Quick Edit turned off, it was in fact automatically turned on any time a sculpting stroke was made, so this way is very little different.
Thank you Marcus, that’s what I was looking for.