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Zbrush newbie question: is it what I'm looking for?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Sorry for posting here, hope is not too OT, if so please feel free to move or delete my post.

I always looked at ZBrush with lot of curiosity, but never actually jumped the pond.
The main thing I’d like to figure out is whether it could be appropriate for my needs or not.

I’d like to speed up my process. What I need to create for 90% of my 3D job is hard surface models, from mech-like stuff to sci-fi surfaces and so on.
So far my work flow it’s been modeling in Blender, as I feel very comfortable with it, and then importing the models in 3ds Max for lighting, texturing, animating and so on. This process, though, is quite time consuming as modeling detailed hard surface stuff takes time.

Now, as I don’t know how ZBrush works yet having seen some wonderful mech / hard surface works made with it, my main doubt is: how dense the mesh will be? Will I be able to export a mesh to work with in 3ds Max to allow me to animate it, duplicate it (like, for instance, for motion graphics stuff), dealing then with a not too dense mesh?

Dunno if I’m explaining clearly enough what my doubts are, hope the question is clear though.

Thanks in advance for any hints.

#2

with the latest updates ZBrush is perfect for your needs! It will speed your worklfow a lot… It did wonders for me

#3

Thank you bomoh.

I guess if I start to look at hard surface tutorials I can probably get a rough idea of what it’s possible to achieve. I actually looked at something already, if I’m not mistaken a very dense cube mesh was used to start to paint on it (forgive me if my terminology is wrong).

By the way I know that the GUI can be a bit scaring for newbie, but honestly I believe that if ZBrush can actually works for my needs, the GUI is not an issue. As everything else it just needs to be studied, as long as I can get what I need from it.

If is not too complicated to explain, in which way the latest release would fit my needs?

EDIT: I guess it’s the panel loops feature.

Thanks.

#4

group loops, panel loops, dynamesh, qRemesher and decimation Master are all going to be your new best friends.

#5

my main doubt is: how dense the mesh will be? Will I be able to export a mesh to work with in 3ds Max to allow me to animate it, duplicate it (like, for instance, for motion graphics stuff), dealing then with a not too dense mesh?

Typically, very dense. Most often you’ll probably want to retopologize the sculpt into something that is much lighter and has better edgeloops for deformation or subdivision. The rest of the detail can then be captured through your texture, normal, and displacement maps. Occasionally (heavily depending on your goal), you may be able to get away with just using the decimation master plugin to crunch down the number of vertices instead.

#6

If you haven’t seen them yet, please give these videos a look! http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?175640

HPolish brush and Planar brush and Clip brushes will suit your needs VERY well, as will slicing.

#7

You should spend up to 1 year, but it’s worth it :cool:

#8

Thank you everyone for your replies.

The videos look very interesting.

Some doubts is left from what Cryrid wrote, as I can’t get a clear idea whether the dense mesh will be good enough to go or not. Maybe some good help to getter a better clue is keep an eye on this forum, look for stuff I’m interested in (mech, hard surface, and so forth), and see if people here also use 3ds Max and animate their Zbrush mesh back in Max.

What verb says sounds a bit concerning though. I understand there’s some irony but hopefully the learning curve is not too steep.

#9

I’m sure we could do a simple test. After work I’ll export some quick models out with various settings so you can see how they look and behave inside of Max.

#10

Thank sounds great, would be really helpful.
Thank you very much Cryrid!

#11

I would also recommend the spiderbot tutorial on http://www.badking.com.au/site/

Very good hard-surfacing tutorials, helped me loads as a newbie getting a workflow an an understanding of Zb and hard surface techniques. Highly recommended.

Steve

#12

Here’s an older and inaccurately modeled ceiling fan as an example: http://cryrid.com/3d/zbrush/meshes/fan-obj.rar

The rar contains the original (traditionally modeled) objs, a carelessly dynameshed version to show you what the topology can be like (3million points), a decimated version down around 630k, and another decimated version around 120k.

#13

Sorry for the late reply.

Steve_R, thank you for the link, that’s really interesting.

Cryrid, thank you very much for the files!
The fan-decimated-127k looks already good to me, I haven’t got any shading problem so far, good results with shadows too. I don’t think I can use the fan-dynameshed-3mil but also it seems I don’t actually need so many polygons. This sample is encouraging, thanks a lot for sharing it.