ZBrushCentral

CreateShell Master Plugin

Okay, this doesn’t exist, but I really really wish it did.

Joseph Drust made an amazing script called Dynamesh Master that I found out about as part of the ZBW course I took on 3D Printing. Essentially the resolution slider is pretty arbitrary for Dynamesh and you really don’t know what polycount you’ll end up with. His script allows you to set a desired polycount and then it will adjust the settings to match. It’s a godsend.

Now what I’m wondering is if anybody knows if this would be possible for the Create Shell function? Essentially I have some very complex models I am adding thickness to and many times I have put an arbitrary number like ‘34’ and created the shell, waited about 30 minutes, and came back to find it was twice as thick as I wanted it.

There’s the possibility that this just isn’t something that can be made, I know nothing about Zscripting, but I was hoping if not maybe somebody could shed some light on the Create Shell values and perhaps help me figure out some math that would determine what my thickness would end up as before I’ve hit the button. I looked in the pixologic documentation and couldn’t find anything useful on where the value of that slider comes from. Is it a percentage? A unit?

Please help!

Thank you all. First post here, hope it’s okay.

I’ve wished for something similar and know your pain of waiting for the shell only to find it’s the wrong size. One thing i think would be necessary is for the plugin to read your transpose units settings (which would have to be setup first) so you could just tell it you want the shell to be 1mm thick or whatever. Hopefully this could be implemented.
For the time being i’m mostly using panel loops for thickness cause it’s faster, but that has some problems that usually need some tweaking.

Maybe you could use the morph target “create difference mesh” technique, so you can visualise beforehand the inner and outer shell and don’t get a bad surprise after a 30 minutes wait. Maybe this doesn’t apply to every case but when it does it sure can spare you a good headache.

U cant find it in documentation but from my own experience set transpose units so it’s show 1 dot as 1 mm
Then if you want 1mm thick walls draw transpose line for 1mm long and count how mony polygons fit in that 1 mm long transpose line if it’s 10 poligons set dynamesh thickness to 10 and you should get 1mm thick wall.

Happy Hollowing

Piosio

Piosio I love you. You are a flippin genius. I just tried it on a little test cylinder and it seems to work… How on earth did you figure that out??? Will test further on my complex mesh and report.

Thank you for the create difference mesh suggestion. I don’t really know exactly what that means to test it, but the issue isn’t that it comes out wrong, the results are great with this, it’s the time and not knowing what value to choose and it seems Piosio has solved this.

Panel loops is also great for something very simple but these meshes are really complex, sculptures with rigging holes cut into them and hair and things, detail mesh that would produce tons of interpenetration with panel loops.

You may find this helpful :slight_smile:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?198754-Dynamesh-Shell-Thickness-Calculator-External