I hope that I’m missing some easy way of doing this.
Here’s my question.
When I sculpt a model and want to add more detail to say its ears is there a way to get more polygons in only the selected area, or do I have to Divide the whole mesh to get that extra level of detail?
Is there a method to mask off the area and then divide it giving only that area a higher level of polys?
I seem to remember seeing something about this in a post before, but I couldn’t find it.
You can mask or hide the polygons that you don’t want divided. However, keep in mind that partial mesh subdivision will always create triangles where the two mesh densities meet. This has a tendency to produce artifacts because triangles and quads don’t smooth the same way when the mesh is divided.
You’re usually better off simply splitting the area off into a different subtool so that you can divide it as much as you’d like.
Say I start out with a basic mesh with one subdivision level, then divide a couple times and then mask off an area and divide some more, and it creates some triangles in my mesh. Then I have a highly detailed mesh. Can I not generate a normal map via Zmapper and get rid of any triangles that might have been created from the masked subdivision?
A mesh can only be partially divided at its lowest subdivision level. So what you have in mind isn’t possible.
But you could partially divide the mesh and work around the triangles, then use ZMapper to project the details, creating a normal map for the original model by using the details from the one that has been partially divided.
www.pixologic.com/docs under the ZMapper section has information on projecting details like this.