Bebop Inc: Experimenting w/ S to Z

[Tartan]

It's been a long time since I have posted anything but Z4 is inspirational and I wanted to see if I still had any sculpting skills at all plus I wanted to see how it would combine with Sculptris, another very fun program. I had an idea in mind and wondered how it would fare if I started the base mesh in Sculptris instead of using Zspheres or Box Modeling. Dynamic Tesselation. Those words have a ring to them

All I used was the sphere that appears when Sculptris first opens and blocked out a rough shape then tugged and pushed and pulled the body out of it on a very basic level, But that's all I needed. The base figure was done in 10 minutes time with most attention paid to nose and fist areas. Export and done.

Once in Zbrush, I remeshed it in the subtool pallete at a rezz of 512 and projected detail so I could use quads instead of Sculptris's tris. I have used this over and over to keep an even polygonal spread as I worked. I wish I had broken the model down in hindsight and used subtools for the clothing. There arent any here and I would have a much easier time developing the character if I had. Tools used here were Inflate, Form Soft, Flatten, Trim Dynamic,various Move tools, Smooth (lots and lots of smooth lol) and one very interesting tool I will be playing with some more. The MoveRing tool in the brush section in LightBox. I derived most of my hard surfaces using that one specific tool and even did most of the face with it including eyes. This model still needs detail work on the arms etc but for the couple of hours while I played with it, well worth the time spent. I will be coming back to it. Now to do his blood brother

[Verde]

One rule you should follow. NO TRIANGLES! Only Polygons. if you plan to rig the character it will make it harder because you will have edges poking around

[huan80]

Actually, the no tris rule is up for debate, particularly with Sculptris in the workflow. Sculptris automatically tessalates your model on the fly, but the result is a triangulated model. The freedom afforded by being able to sculpt with absolutely no thought given to topology is incredible, and the tris aren't necessarily a problem because in almost every modern sculpting workflow these days it's assumed that you'll do a retopo pass before you get into rigging anyways.
It's a pretty big paradigm shift, but if you ask me it's about time. To quote the great philosopher and muppet Yoda, "You must unlearn what you have learned."

[Tartan]

I guess its my fault for saying no subtools were used. Me saying I remeshed at a rez 512 to spread the polygons evenly is an automatic "I used the sub tool pallette". I meant that there are no other subtools like masking one out and extracting and keeping that inside the tool. The second mesh is quad. I will edit the original post to reflect that. That being said, I will say that the benefits derived from Dynamic Tesselation are very considerable. The ability to be able to very Easily block out base forms and more complicated forms, then refine them in Zbrush is, as noted by some wise soul in the sticky thread above us, "Gamebreaking".

What Huan says is entirely true. Assuming I take it to the rigging phase I would most definitely retopo. I just wish I had gone the subtool route for the clothing that I instead carved into him. Thats what makes it difficult.