Adding topology to interior of sculpt

#1

Hello,

I’m just digging into zbrush, and no,doubt this has been covered somewhere, but every “sculpt to animation” tutorial I’ve found seems to be in two parts, sculpting and then rigging/animating but kind of skips over the middle.

So…

Simply enough. I’ve got a model that is sculpted, uv’d, and textured. I retopoed with topogun and am ready to rig it except for the mouth. The mouth of the sculpt is sealed (which I believe is pretty normal.

Now, I thought that I would be able to just add that geometry in in maya by splitting the lips, modeling the interior, and then importing the new geometry into zbrush over my original level 1 geo. but the results I’m getting are all messed up. And the morph brush becomes greyed out when I subdivide the new geometry.

I know that zbrush projects details and understands models based on the vert orders, so I’ve created the new geo a couple ways (attaching a separate model, extruding) but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. The mouth interior is completely messed up after zbrush reprojects the details and is unsalvageable.

Also, I’m thinking it was a mistake to polypaint before my geometry and uv’s were finished. If you wanted to you could just confirm that suspicion for me. But mostly I just need to know what a normal workflow for completing the interior geometry of a sculpt headed for rigging for film purposes would be.

Zbrush 4.0, maya 2012. Thanks for any help, I’ve been stuck here for a while.

#2

Hard to tell with out a screen shot,
you could mask the lips and blur the mask so it doesn’t project
or geometry>crease

when you store a morph target your only storing morph on that subd level 
so if the subd level changes then you lose the morph target.
if you lose the morph target you need to go back to the subd level it was created on
OR create a new morph target on your new subd level

topogun has morph http://vimeo.com/20202145

#3

That did it. Thanks.

Is this a conventional workflow? I just have to assume that it is very common to sculpt something and then finish unseen but needed bits of geometry later. I watched a gnomon DVD where he modeled a woman and said it was for animation and her lips were sealed.

So how would you approach that step in the process. The masking got the job done but I’ll have to resculpt some of the details near the connection (since they were masked off) which isn’t a big deal but could be more of an issue with a different model.

I also found this thread:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-935240.html

The method described by magma pixel at the bottom seams like it might do the trick as well. I’m just wondering what the best way to go about this is because it is going to be coming up again and this model is really just a workflow tester.

Thanks again!

Note: I misspoke in my first post and it was confusing. I wasn’t “projecting” the details so much as importing low level geometry with a similar tool selected. So using the subtool project all function with the added details masked off is what worked.

#4

make sure the compatibility is set to .ZTL
look on top subdivision > preferences>compatibility

another thing is topogun ztl compatibility maybe a little out dated and may cause problems (not for sure)
to make sure
bring both OBJ into zbrush and make polymesh 3D and export them and re try importing to project.

have you tried zbrush QRemesher for retopo?
its a time saver

#5

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