Hey ZCentral! I’m hard at work in the lab on my current piece and I thought of a sweet ZBrush feature that i would love to use if it existed. I’m on a team at the moment working on a project in ZBrush and Maya that’s only concentrated on the modeling. It occurs to me that my character couldn’t be animated unless she were retopped (which i find very time consuming) and I was thinking about a work flow option that would make creating rig ready sculpts super quick and easy. I thought of a method that would use user dictated polypaint groups to define where deformation would occur later in the pipeline. so say you take a high res model you’ve created and want to make a simple base mesh that you can not only stick your disp maps onto after you’ve projected the details, but that deforms nicely for the riggers and animators in your team. decimation is great for reducing polycount, but it’s not always a clean mesh.
so i though: take your high res original, open the theoretical plug in, and start painting in the groups you want. the points on the mesh at which the color changes would be recognized as joints or areas that will be deformed in some way. then once you have everything painted how you want it you can dial up a resolution and let the plug in create your deformable (and efficient) new base mesh. then it’s projection, UV’s and disp maps and you’ve got a rig ready model the zsphere retopping option is nice, but anything that can be done in a thousand clicks should be able to be done in 3 all of this was just a product of my infinite ability to day dream, but i have a sneaking suspicion that something like this might already exist. i’m still learning the entirety of zbrush, so if you know of anything like this, let me know what you think
adios!