Creating a Border around Surface of Mesh

#1

Hello everyone,

I’m working on a mesh that I pulled out from a different mesh in the following way:

  1. Paint a mask on the mesh.
  2. Duplicate the mesh.
  3. Delete the unmasked part.
  4. Panel loop the left over part to give it some depth (about 3 loops, .0025 thickness, 70ish polish, 50 bevel).

The first 2 (labels 1 and 2 ) images show this process.

What I want to do with the new mesh is add a border around the edges (and on the actual surface of the mesh). You can see in image 3 that I do a masking for the part that I want to be the border. I just invert the mask and then do an inflation.

Then you can see the problems in image 4. The mesh isn’t smooth and gets these weird jagged edges. The smooth brush can’t really get rid of them either.

These jagged edges appear wherever the front edge basically ends a column of quads with a triangle (if that makes any sense at all). A better way to put it perhaps is that those artifacts show up because edge isn’t a perfect continuous line going from top to bottom. This is the case due to how I construct the mesh. The extraction will just pull the original mesh’s geo and then the panel loops will insert the geometry it can to get the panel loop working.

So my question is… is there a way I can do this in an artifact free fashion within zbrush? I’m guess I could accomplish this by taking a lot of time inside blender to get a perfect edge such that the inflate works how I want it to.

I’ve tried using zremesher with guides but that really doesn’t get the job done. I know there are other ways to generate borders. For example, you can panel loop the edge polygroup to get a border effect. But I’m very picky and want the border to look like it does here (well artifact free of course).

Thanks for any help anyone can provide!

#2

Youre fighting against topology and even with Zremesher you may be running into the same issue. Cleanest way is to have a sculpted base and clean it up by retop-ing it. If you are looking for something extra clean and accurate, it may save you time to just retop it instead of trouble shooting. Up to you ! :slight_smile:

#3

your using polish on mask, thats not going to work very well, you cant polish mask.
get rid of the mask and add your panel loop, you now have panel loop and thickness,
hide part of the mesh so it look flat with no thickness then tool>make polymesh 3d
then tool>Zremesher
now add panel loop or use tool>subtooL>extract to add thickness.

you may not need to do all these step, try just tool>Zremesher
then your panel loop

option under mask to mask border then press grow to make a larger mask border.
you can all so do edge mask thickness on your double sided mesh by mask border
then tool>deformation>inflat

all kinds of ways

https://i.imgur.com/QURBmvg.jpg