I’ve decided I should probably just follow the book as I’m learning Zbrush. Well, for the most part anyway. I am already planning on starting a new dragon when I finish the lessons in the book. So I might as well just follow along and see what happens.
You’re probably trying to figure out what I’m talking about. Remember the edge loop problem I mentioned, where it was all going whacked? I found a way for it to not go whacked. I might as well have just worked with them at the all whacked out, freaked out point because I still had to fix them later because even though they looked right, they weren’t. When I stepped up a subdivision level I found that at that level the edge loops had still gone all askew and crazy. In fact, the book says to step up a subdivision level and smooth out the edge loops because they can get pinched at the higher subdivision levels. So, the smoothing has to be done at each level. I should have read a little ahead.
There have been a couple of things that don’t really match the book. I attribute this to the fact that the book is for Zbrush 4 and I have Zbrush 4r4. Fortunately the differences have not resulted in a 30 minute hunt through a wiki and then the menus and sub-menus to find what I needed.
One difference is that most of the Zbrush plugins that are available are already included in version 4r4 where I guess they weren’t in the earlier versions. So where the book steps me through downloading and installing a particular plugin, I don’t have to, it’s already there.
Another thing I’ve run into was setting the thickness when making a mesh extraction. Doing what the book says results in something not at all usable. To be fair, it could just be a typo. However, when I set the thickness to .5 like the book says, well, this made and even bigger mess than the edge loops. I found a setting of .005 worked much better.
I really like the mesh extract and think it’s going to make a big difference for me. A few of the other things that have been introduced since the edge loops are: inserting a subtool, this went much better than when I tried it on my own, I’ve now used an alpha for creating a raised area, there’s all the transpose tools like move, scale, rotate, and of course there’s the mesh extraction. What’s really cool is that I’m starting to think of how to use those in some of the other projects I’ve tried.
So I’m cruising along and making progress. I can’t wait for the weekend when I can spend even more time working on learning Zbrush!