I’m still getting to grips with zbrush and this evening I learnt about building a mesh around another mesh with the topology thing and zspheres. Its very cool…
However, unless theres some way to bake the hi poly mesh onto the new low poly mesh I just dont quite see where it would fit in with a workflow…
Is there something I’m missing or is it just there if you would rather build your low poly in zbrush as supposed to another poly modelling program?
What do people find it useful for?
i haven’t done it yet myself, although I’m sure i will. but i do know that you can transfer all the little details of your hi-res sculpt to the new low res topology you created. some people find creating a simple mesh for sculpting and retopologizing it later preferable to building a complex topology mesh first. just a matter of preference.
You can’t project all the details onto it, but you can build a normal map and that is great for game or animation use.
There are tools that you can capture %99 of the detail from your original mesh. In the Adaptive skin feature there’s a project button which will work miracles. Just remember to plan your sculpt and only get so far before you re-tope.
Ah cool, I’ll have to have a play with the adaptive skin when I get some more time. Is thAt what one would do for getting an nmap then? Project the detail onto it then use zmapper? Or is there actually a way to use zmapper to create normal map between the 2 mesh’s?
Adaptive skin - sculpt fine details - Zmapper - 3d app.
I struggled with this question until I built something a little more serious than a head. Doesn’t matter what you start with, unless you start with a fully finished mesh from your 3D application, that you will not change.
If you start with a sphere, or a close approximation of your shape, at some point retopologising will help.
If for example you have a box that will become a hand, and a similar size poly on the chest area, the level of detail in the had will be a lot greater than the chest area. So when you come to subdivide to scult, youll need to have a much higher level for the hand, than the chest. To compensate for this you can retopologise the hand area to give you more polys, and therfore get more detail there without lots of waisted pollies everywhere else.
If you take a ball, and sculpt it into a full person, you will want to retopologise it to create a base mesh (low poly), to take into your 3d Application and project a discplacement map on.
There are a lot of reasons to retopologise. ONce you get used to how to do it, and all the little tricks that can make it very quick, its really useful.
Retopologize is something that most people would eventually face when their works become more complex.
If you plan your work well enough, then it shoudnt be a problem. But sometime what we didnt saw coming when making a low res became apparent when going higher.
Bad topology can affect Higher mesh projection as well as bad deformation when animated.
Once you have the lo-res and the hi-res meshes, I would suggest using something other than ZBrush to bake out your normal maps. xNormal is great (and free) and will give you amazing maps in just a few seconds, or just bake it inside another 3d app. Zmapper always seems to bake out rather ‘muddy’ maps, losing a lot of the fine details that you sculpted.
retopoing is actually a very useful tool. If you create a mesh out of Zspheres, the head and hands are going to be the highest poly places. My general work flow is to create the mesh out of Zspheres, do a high amount of detail to the face and some to the body. I will then retopo my mesh and get a good poly flow. You can then project all your detail from your zsphere mesh, to your retopo mesh. It lets you make a better mesh for games, and it lets you have over all a cleaner mesh to mess with. As for projecting the normals, I have found the zbrush is a great program to use to create normals. I will usually use a program called Crazy Bump in order to create either a different set of normals, or any other passes such as AO.
ZMapper will create excellent maps. You just need to fiddle with the settings. Good UV’s are essential for this though, so while xNormal is good it’s not really necessary. In the same breath group UV’s will work well for some things sometimes, doing UV’s by hand in another app is usually the best idea.
Cool, lots of interesting comments. I guess Ill bash out a zsphere humanoid mesh tonight and spend my day of from work tomorrow working on a character while exploring some of the techniques talked about. I’d rather spend as much time as I can in zbrush and as little as possible in max, so if i can… great 