ZBrushCentral

Thickness to an object and recover/retain sub-d levels?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I have done this before but it wasn’t the ideal thing to do. I don’t remember everything i did but I got exactly what I wanted.

I created a shirt in Zbrush, and I want that shirt to have thinkness, I work without thickness when making clothes, because thick clothing doesn’t work well when you use any type of projection, it just screws everything up. (although it’s possible to work with it by hiding one face and working with the other)

I want my shirt to have the same look in both parts, I don’t know if I make myself clear here. It was a shirt with no thickness to it, now it has thickness, so it has two faces, and I want both to look identical.

So there’s 2 options to give thickness to my shirt, either use the extract option and add a thickness value (putting both the edge and surface smoothness down to 0 to retain detail).

The second option is to bring the topology in for retopo and use the thickness slider, but this won’t work for higher level meshes, since retopo won’t accept more than 15000 (although it could work if you do it by parts)

There are a couple of problems with these options, sometimes extract changes your topo too much, and then how do you get back the subdiv levels. It actually works sometimes if you the isolate the thick edge that was created (it should be in it’s own polygroup) and use the edge loop command a couple of times, then use reconstruct. It will actually reconstruct, but it doesn’t work all the time, since like I said before, Extract changes topo sometimes.

Any ideas?

#2

Originally posted by Znub,

The second option is to bring the topology in for retopo and use the thickness slider, but this won’t work for higher level meshes, since retopo won’t accept more than 15000 (although it could work if you do it by parts)
I don’t think you are using retopology features properly. See this post about Retopology and Editing Topology.

#3

I know how to use them. My mesh already has the topology I want, just need to add the thickness. It’s a different issue.

#4

OK, I must have misunderstood. Sounds like, instead of trying to use existing topology to create your thickness, you might have to retopologize the shirt, at which point, you will be able to use the Skin Thickness slider in the Topology submenu then project your high level details onto that. Now I know you said that projection onto thick clothing doesn’t work well, but did you try it with Backface Masking enabled?. Now, i’m not saying this the solution to your problem, i’m just throwing out some suggestions.

edit: regarding projection (Project All), I heard somewhere that you will get better results if PA Blur is set to 8. Also, you could try using Project All one subdivision at a time, starting at the lowest and working your way up to the highest.