ZBrushCentral

Tip: how to smooth those spikes out...

Not sure this is the right place in the forum to post this.

Geometry projections often cause those horrible spikes in the top level geometry…
I spent tedious hours cleaning those f~~~~~ by hand.
Well I just realised there’s a quick way to smooth them out.

This is how you do it.

  • Go to top level (where normally the spikes are. You can normally see the spikes on lower levels but you really don’t wanna try to smooth them there…)

  • Hide most of the model leaving the area whith problems (to see better what is going on)

  • Paint a mask on the whole visible model (you have to paint the mask, without using a huge brush and not by drawing a box or lasso. As the spikes are so difficult to paint, so you are likely to miss them, while you will mask
    the rest of the geometry).

  • Using a big brush, smooth the spikes.A large enough brush (ie: a radius bigger than the lenght of the spikes) should catch the spikes and smooth those rebels out.
    And the the mask should keep the rest of the model intact, so you can smooth it very quickly. Done!

You can use the deformations to smooth the unmasked geometry (the spikes) but I personally prefer to do it by hand, just in case I missed some parts when I painted the mask on the whole model… you don’t want to smooth the good geometry… or you’ll be wasting time again fixing that.

Not exactly an automatic method (I feel it would be possible to write something that smoothes out the spikes automatically based on a treshold),
but it works better than all the other manual approaches I used.

Maybe this method is general knowledge or there’s a better method out there which I don’t know about. If so, please let me know!
I tried other approaches (cavity masks) to automatically mask the spikes, but nothing worked for me.

Andrea

good job dude that will work fine :slight_smile:

If you are getting spikes, trying turning down your projection distance.

I usually store a morph target before projecting, then i paint it out the spikes by using the “morph brush”…

Also, they seem to happen on five edged vertices. You can avoid them a little by reducing “star” vertices on your new low poly.

the morph brush is definitelly the right way to fix this. thanks for letting me know!