treyharrell.com

Video Tutorial: Recreating a damaged sculpt and texturing in ZBrush with New Topology & UVs

February 11th, 2009

I think most people that have used ZBrush have gotten something really cool (or at least promising) sculpted out, and had either lower levels of subdivision get corrupt, or have your geometry get mangled… either through a crappy basemesh that you used to get up and running quickly, or invisible bad topology on a mesh that you tweaked point by point.

In this case, I was just noodling a concept from a stock basemesh that had terrible topology and I ended up losing my lowest sub-d levels at a pretty early stage. The model and texturing aren’t the greatest, but they’re not meant to be. They’re meant to be fast exercises to help arrive at a final product faster.

The following video is a half-hour step-by-step walkthrough of how you can find yourself in that situation, and how to recover your detail on a clean mesh.

Strictly speaking, the workflow is a retopology technique, but I’d never seen it applied to imported meshes with new UVs, and I’d definitely never seen recovery of polypaint/texturing info from a mucked up model.

http://www.treyharrell.com/tutes-2009/medretopo-pt1/ 

Approximately 30 minutes, embedded Flash video @ 800×600

Entry Filed under: CG, Tutorial