Subdiv Crease Edges

[chadtheartist]

Ortho’s work great for front/side/top etc… view, because you’re not worrying about perspective in those views.

However, as soon as you start getting into 3/4 views, you loose all sense of appropriate proportion due to the orthographic view completely killing any “natural” perspective we see in a 3/4 view. It’s hard to judge proportions and how they relate to each other in an orthographic 3/4 view.

That’s probably my biggest pet peeve of Zbrush as of right now. The Mac version has perspective sculpting, although not exactly what I was expecting, but hopefully Pixologic will give us the option to adjust the perspective view in 2.5 like you would in other 3D apps.

Ofer’s tip is something I’ve been doing for awhile. Although I use Silo to crease edges so it works a bit different than what other apps might do, i.e. it creates extra edges to simulate creasing. So I generally can’t reconstruct all the way to the base cage because of the extra edges it adds. What app are you using to crease your edges in Bay? Mirai?

[Giantsun]

Must be one of those things then, cause my favorite portrait photos are done close with a 50 lens, I only ever use teles in stadiums to shoot music concerts and football games.
I think THE thing to use for 3d models will be this, when its ready that is:
http://www.lightspacetech.com/
in a somewhat near future…and you can use it both in ortho and perspective. Now that would be an update heh?

[spiraloid]

tim, nice. yeah I had some of the same memory errors and crashes. I’m trying to learn the rules about what can or cannot be reconstructed… hmm looks like you can have quads or triangles on the base mesh. no 5+ faces, which makes sense, since they subdivide into a triangle- which is the failure for reconstruction.

Giantsun, that volumetric display is rad!

chad, used wings for that one, but I also use maya and bit of xsi.

as for perspective, exactly right about telephoto and shooting supermodels. still, there’s a difference between shooting from a satallite vs, shooting across a warehouse lightstage right?

[LY1]

Word of advice about reconstructing: I’ve found that the Zbrush displacement generation tool will produce weird results on thin and sharp features, when you are creating the map by comparing the level 1 mesh and the level 5-6-n mesh. We’ve had a lot of problems with this on Warhammer initially, as we’ve tried to allow the Zbrush sculptors to modify proportions too, instead of only detailing the models. Sword blades, armor edges etc. got inflated most of the time, characters had bulging teeth, and so on.
However, if I’ve stored the original unsubdivided control cage as a morph target before sculpting, and then re-activated it for the map exctraction, then the maps were correct.

So here goes the problem: you import a highres, creased model and use the reconstruct lower level feature repeatedly to generate the level 1 mesh. I haven’t tried it yet but I’m quite sure it’d mess up the displacement map generation. Point order is also messed up, which means you can’t just import the original unsubdivided cage. So you’d be kinda stuck again - now you have a good Zbrush mesh, but how to get good maps?

Suggestion: keep your old, unsubdivided mesh in your modeling ap, and import the level 1 Zbrush mesh on top of it. You can then activate vertex snap and move the points back to the original place, export and reimport to Zbrush and store it as a morph target for map extraction.

But of course this is a good old waste of quality time… so we have a nice little Maya plugin that can snap meshes with identical topology but different vertex numbers. I’m sorry that I can’t give it out, but it’s probably not that complicated for a Maya API programmer, and this is such a good tool for many cases (fixing messed up blendshapes was another good use).

[abe_Tamazir]

got exactly the same problem you experienced LY…lucky you got that plug :)…I am doing exactly the same thing and the mesh explode once you bring yur morph mesh into the scene and try to go back to L2