Ludvigs,
You tried creasing or beveling the edges where they intersect before subdividing?
Has anyone had any luck with zRemesher to spit out perfect or near perfect facial topology? I think I’m on to something and thought I’d share to get others who may have better ideas on the same page.
Anyways, you wanna start by making polygroups for each section and go into zRemesmer and turn on “KeepGroups”. Leave smooth groups on default setting, turn off “Adapt” (this really messes wit the result for some reason). You can either choose to use curves or none, it either makes a big difference, or not at all depending on how you set it up.
![QTv70Yw[1].jpg](http://www.zbrushcentral.com/uploads/default/original/4X/7/4/d/74d9b14ff3eb66f8ab745046c8b2d84ef46d309f.jpeg)
Left to right - Original hipoly mesh, zRemesher with curves, zRemesher without curves.
Still trying different polygroup set ups too. cutting up from the middle of the eye/mouth may also yield better results too.
![SPZ00Ib[1].png](http://www.zbrushcentral.com/uploads/default/original/4X/e/8/1/e817b6011638fd1091b1d851bb8dd114589723f9.png)
Also try running zremesher a second time with poly count set to same. This has improved the topology in my simple meshes.
Thanks for the tip Andreseloy…
Cross22
I found that:
1.If I do step x step a get nice result
2.Have you try align edges(i did not know to use it right now!i dont have success…sorry)
Ludvigs
I will make an exercise with your issue but for the momento i think is better in the first time to not use the crease, i prefer to used it when i think my model is near finish
Floreum
I have read/or saw in some videos that the ALT option plus…
have to do with some topology issue.
Treece
very kind from you,always is a pleasure if i can help in something
Pendraia
your welcome, and thanks to EZHexagon for his attitude to share some inside in the ZMarvelous-ZModeler tool!
You tried creasing or beveling the edges where they intersect before subdividing?
Yes, it does work somewhat if I have enough resolution in the low-res, but that is not always practical with complex hard surfaces. The image on the right is with a creased solution. The other is with beveling the creased edges. All the various ways I’ve come up with to Add edges/bevel/crease, have yielded some sort of pinched or weird result.
Is it just me that’s bothered by these things? Am I thinking about this in the entirely wrong way?
I will make an exercise with your issue but for the momento i think is better in the first time to not use the crease, i prefer to used it when i think my model is near finish
Does this not mean you won’t be able to see your subdivided result before the model is finished? I may have misunderstood you. Beveling at least, I feel is best to to at the very end. I try to preview it with creasing, then add-edges/bevel, but it gets a bit clumsy for me at times. I’d love to see what you can come up with 
It may well be I’ll have to consign myself to dynamesh for these things, but I at least feel I have to try:p
I’m no expert at Zmodeler and definitely not with low poly modeling, but after one of my projects to learn Zmodeler here are some things that worked for me.
These are just the tools I used - not trying to say this is the way to do it.
1 I picked a project and tried to only use zmodeler to build it. I picked Hellboy’s gun because I found some good reference on the web.
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I built each part with what I could figure out intuitivley. In other words some pieces started off as just a cylander or a box. Until the whole gun was built.
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then I rebuilt each piece sometimes ten to fifteen times. It didn’t take long. Each reiteration became better.
4 I watched some videos about particular parts of zmodelere that I was having trouble with. Then rebuilt again.
This took about a week. The main problem I had with aligning points had to do with I was trying to build stuff like in blender. In blender I can just type in numbers and points line up. You can lock off an axis very easily.
You can align in zmodeler but it is very dependent upon what you are trying to do. I had to try move infinite radius or slide or align edges - I got a feel for which one as I built them. Again it is not easy to explain but by the time I built the final version of the final piece - the chamber of the gun - it only took a couple of minutes and I intuitively used the transpose lines to move things into place.
Things I had to remind myself to do -
Use masking. Zbrush can mask individual polygons now. Then use the transpose tool. Use the shift key to lock off the view. Every situation will be different - but after doing this it just sort of clicked how to use the transpose tool to align things quickly and perfectly straight. The transpose tool lines up so nicely with points now. It’s amazing.
Turn off perspective.
Again this is hardly perfect and my explanation isn’t that clear - but I found that by seeing it as a process rather than as a set of operations (click here, move here, add this point) it is much more flexible. In other words it is more of a feeling for which tool to use than hard and fast rules.
One thing however - I found that the move brush in concert with zmodeler is great for getting COMPLEX models right. Sometimes the move points option of zmodeler does not work the way I want because it is hard to get the right viewing angles - using the move brush instead can have more accurate alignment. Doing it by eye while moving points can be frustrating.
In the final model here I did zremesh a few things (the chamber was two pieces - I dynameshed, zremeshed and spent about a minute to finish the piece).
I have not found a good way to weld two sections together - although I did weld some polys and delete some here and there I found it was better to try to build the model so as to avoid welding large portions together. In the relatively simple center block of the gun I had to do this under the arch. I could not find another way.
If you want to see the final keyshot renders they are in my gallery here.
Attachments
There’s a lot of great info here. Hopefully bit-by-bit it will sink in. So I’m now following this thread.
Great Zbrush Modeler tutorials on Youtube. Apologies if it’s already been listed on this thread.
www.youtube.com/user/musashidanmcgrath/videos
Many thanks Danny (McGrath) for posting these on Youtube. Excellent videos and definitely nice to see slower videos.
Recommendation to everyone who maybe learning Zmodeler.
Thebest12 wrote: … Ryan did look kind of lost. Did you see in video.
Yes I agree. My impression was he rushed the video to get it out before anyone else. Now that he has possibly had more time to study the ZModeller, his future videos will be up to his usual high standard.
In this movie at 1:30 the tool suddenly works symmetrical. I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to work with symmetry? In the toolbar you can see the ‘normal’ symmetry setting isn’t highlighted either…
Edit Nevermind, I figured it out. I thought the X key didn’t work, but my symmetry was off centre…
Thought I’d put some thoughts out there on creasing.
At first I imported it to 3ds Max and creased the edges manually there. Good show, but no real way of getting them out of Zbrush, though exporting Polygroups as selection sets through FBX is helpful.
Maya though, will happily take your creases using GoZ. Had some issues, but re-installing GoZ seemed to fix it, which suggests it was on my end. The only gripe I have with Maya so far is that it seems to kill your Polygroups 
Yea, so what’s so cool about that? You still need to muck about with the beveling, right? Well, With OpenSubDiv we no longer need to bother with that, just use semi-creased edges instead:). Nicely beveled edges using crease sets without actually having to bother with beveling :D!
Any thoughts on this folks? And more importantly, do you know a way to get Maya to keep your Polygroups?
I want to go back and forth, dammit!
<iframe width=“854” height=“510” src=“https://www.youtube.com/embed/6ZNiIxsdrWw” frameborder=“0” allowfullscreen></iframe>
array tips
Paul Gaboury did a video on Discover What’s New In ZBrush4R7 - mostly cover zmodeller - a little on nanomesh and array.
Has anyone else encountered this problem: when I use the zmodeler function, “add polygroup to curve,” I can then use an insert curve brush (in my case, an insert zipper brush) and the curve function seems to work properly, and I get a continuous zipper around the polygroup. However, when I use the zmodeler function “add edge to curve,” and I select a number of concentric edges (see screenshots), and then use my insert mesh, I get a bunch of zipper segments of my tri-parts brush… which, obviously, is not what I want. Does anyone know a workaround for this, or what I’m doing wrong? Any help would be much appreciated!
Cheers!
Has anyone else encountered this problem: when I use the zmodeler function, “add polygroup to curve,” I can then use an insert curve brush (in my case, an insert zipper brush) and the curve function seems to work properly, and I get a continuous zipper around the polygroup. However, when I use the zmodeler function “add edge to curve,” and I select a number of concentric edges (see screenshots), and then use my insert mesh, I get a bunch of zipper segments of my tri-parts brush… which, obviously, is not what I want. Does anyone know a workaround for this, or what I’m doing wrong? Any help would be much appreciated!
Cheers!
It would seem the “add edge to curve” does not in fact weld together the verticies, so as to make a single continuous curve that’s needed for IM curve brushes. I haven’t been able to find a workaround for this, besides adding to the curve using an actual curve brush, and (overly) fancy polygrouping. Perhaps there will be features later that allows for editing and exporting these curves, like 3ds Max splines or the like. Fingers Crossed
Exactly! I guess I was wondering if there was some setting that I was missing that welded the “curve verts” together. If there isn’t, wouldn’t that be an awesome feature! Hint, hint, wink, wink 
Yeah struggled with that in the beginning as well. Guess the Add Edge to Curve wasn’t really meant to be used this way.
Ok, so I figured out a workaround. Kind of a no-brainer, really, but there SO MANY options in that zmodeler window, I missed it the first go around.
Instead of using the edge action to create a curve to use your IM brush on, use the the point action “make curve” and then use your IM brush. It works like a charm.
See screen shots:
Perfect ! Thanks for sharing !