Zremesher - All settings EXPLAINED!

what's up guys i'm eric and today we are talking all things remesher let's go [Music] sometimes i wish zbrush had a counter for all the times you press the specific button because your mesher is probably the button that i've pressed more times in zbrush than anything else i can think of you can do a whole lot with it and it's extremely extremely powerful and it's gotten more powerful in the past couple years and they continue to improve it and add new features so let's go ahead and jump in and take a look at some of those features now the first thing you're going to want to do is open up the geometry tab and go down to z remesher let's start by just hitting the zero mesher button in the top left and see what happens as you can plainly see it took our extremely high polygon mesh and reduced it down to a mesh that's around 10 500 points it also did a pretty good job of minding the topology of the model you can see that there's edge loops around the eyes and edge loops around the mouth but one thing it missed was a line down the center indicating symmetry and that's because we didn't have symmetry enabled so let's go ahead and undo and hit x on our keyboard so that symmetry is enabled and then just hit zero measure again this time you'll see that there is a line directly down the middle of the mesh and now we know that symmetry is working the next button on the menu is the legacy button this is because up until a few years ago there was a older algorithm of zero mesher i think in zbrush 2019 they updated it with a whole bunch of new features with a renewed focus on hard surface modeling now according to pixel logic the old algorithm can be useful for characters on organic surfaces while the new one is geared more towards hard surface i can tell you as a character artist i've pretty much only used the new one since it came out i don't ever really find a situation where i sit here and play between the two give the note and it might be something that you want to mess around with you'll also notice when we selected the legacy algorithm a couple options grayed out and that's because those options were introduced with the new one and they are not supported by the old model let's compare between the current zero mesher and the legacy zebra mesher overall to my eye they look pretty much identical the only thing i noticed was around the eyelids there's a stronger edge loop defining the eyelid but that's really only because we had detect edges selected and i'm not sure if it's any indication of the differences in the algorithms themselves now the next thing we're going to look at is freeze border so this is a weird one and if anybody knows please post in the comments from my experimentations and testing freeze border and freeze groups doesn't seem to really work with the current zero measure from what i can tell it doesn't do anything that it's supposed to it only creates weird edge loops and geometry so i think these are legacy features that are meant to work with the legacy version of z remesher but if you know more or have a correction please let me know in the comments so the purpose of freeze border is that you can isolate a section of your mesh give it its own poly group and then z remesh adjust that area while retaining the same ordering vertices between the selected part of the mesh and the not selected part of the mesh in our example we can reduce the topology of just this area that we see while not affecting the rest of the model and here's that example you can see that the edge flow and topology is rebuilt on the section that we have selected well the rest of it remains unchanged and you can see along that border there i had to split and do a lot of crazy stuff to the quads around that edge to make sure that those two sections blended now the purpose of freeze groups is to be able to re-topologize different poly groups of the mesh without the topology influencing the bordering poly groups so each section is kind of re-topologized in isolation while retaining that border like freeze border so it's trying to keep the areas separate while also rebuilding topology moving on we're going to go ahead and skip keep groups keep creases and detect edges for the time being because we're going to bring up another example for those the next one you'll notice is the target polygon count and this is basically a slider that you can adjust the amount of polys that you want to zero mesh to and it's sort of an arbitrary number there might be some equation to it but i typically just play with the number until i find the distribution of polygons that i was looking for so by default it's at five go lower or higher based on your needs or what you're trying to do so here's an example of it at five we can turn it down to one and here it is much much lower at one we lose a lot of our detail but we do get a pretty clean mesh this is for our retro 8-bit orc you'll also notice underneath target polygon count there's double same in half and when you select one of these the slider grays out because you're basically just picking a preset instead you're either doubling your current count you're trying to keep the current amount of polys the same or you're cutting them in half trying to do a quick remesh without worrying about that setting you can just hit one of those and remesh and then get back to work now the target polygon count doesn't work in isolation it works in conjunction with this setting that you see here which is adapt it's basically taking these two settings with a give or take to determine the final output of the mesh you can adjust the adaptive size all the way from zero to a hundred and the adaptive size is doing two things one it's determining if it should use quads or triangles the more adaptive it is the more willing it is to use triangles the second thing that it's doing is the higher the adaptive size the more it's going to adhere to the original shape of the mesh sacrificing the target polygon count so the higher that setting is if it's feeling that it's starting to lose the overall form of the mesh it's going to add more geometry to make sure it holds it at the expense of the target polygon count now here's a quick example of the adaptive strength set to 0 and the adaptive strength set to 100. on the left you can see that it much more closely matched what our target polygon count was and on the right you can see that it added a lot more polys to hold the form you can really see this around the nose and around the ears it added more geometry to make sure that it wasn't sacrificing the shape of the model there the next thing to look at is curve strength curve strength is a setting based on a brush and so what we need to do is switch our brush to what's called the zebra mesher guides what the zero measure guides allow us to do is draw curves on our model that help influence the direction of the topology in this first example we're just going to draw a really crazy curve that reinforces what actually happens when we remesh a object using a curve so as you can see the topology ended up creating this weird spiral around his jaw and that was influenced from the curve that we drew now let's take a look at a more realistic application of these ear measure guides you typically use these when you really want to reinforce the topology on something like a head or body and so in this instance we're using our knowledge of good facial edge loops to draw some loops around the face that help guide the topology we'll also do one around the ear so here's the final result and here's the result compared to the default zero measure now truth be told you can't really tell a difference and this is more a testament to how good zero mesher has gotten but it's a good tool to know about if you're in a situation where the topology is acting really weird when you zebra mesh and you want to try to have more control you can use these guides to give you a whole lot of control the actual curve strength slider will influence how much the zebra mesher to those curves so if it's turned way down it won't really take those as influence whereas if it's turned way up it'll try to use those to guide the topology to its maximum effect so you can find a balance between letting it do its thing and those guys have an influence over the final result last but certainly not least we have used poly paint and what this allows us to do is actually paint on our mesh to inform how dense topology should be after the zero mesh occurs and the way this works is red means that there needs to be way more topology than the other areas and blue means there needs to be way less topology in other areas and you can actually adjust the intensity of these colors to infer how intense that final result should be so you can take that color density slider and slide it back and forth and it'll bring you from blue to red and all the shades in between now keep in mind white means that there's no influence so when you're doing this you want to flood your model with white first and then paint the red and blue hues on top of it this is especially useful on full characters where you want the face to have a lot more information than the rest of the body so i might paint the chest or the back or certain areas of the body the blue well i'll paint the front of the face red so that i have enough geometry to add small details on the face and then areas that might be covered by clothing we can have less geometry let's hop over to a different example so we can look at some of these options that were in the middle here and take a look at what those do all right so what we're going to do now is we're going to hop back up to those settings we skipped earlier and use a new example to show them here is a simple piece of geometry i made just using booleans to smash a bunch of primitives together you can see this was the original just took a bunch of shapes crammed them together but for purposes of showing these tools it should work just fine and you can see the result is fairly uniform but it retains the topology of the original meshes and it has to do this kind of crazy stitching to merge everything together so let's try to clean this up but first let's go over these three settings that we looked at before we begin let's just zero mesh this with all settings off to see what happens as you can see it's pretty rough so let's undo now these settings are pretty self-explanatory keep groups will retain your polygroups after you use z-remesh so any polygroups that we have assigned it'll keep those when you activate keep groups you get smooth groups and smooth groups basically determines the blending between two polygroups during the z-remesh so let's see if we can demonstrate the difference first we'll zero mesh with smooth group set to one reset the target polygon count to five and turn on adapt and that's just gonna help us actually see what's happening a little bit better okay so the mesh still isn't where we want it to be but you can see that we kept the polygroups for each shape let's undo and turn smooth groups to zero and see what happens with smooth groups set to zero you can see that the shape is a little more similar to its original shape at least it's keeping edges but overall it's still pretty rough looking let's undo we'll turn keep groups off and turn on keep creases now keep creases is pretty self-explanatory if you have any creases it'll make sure to hold those after the xero mesh so in order to demonstrate this we have to go up to crease we'll just do a simple crease and you'll see that we have this kind of dotted line at the edges that indicates that the mesh is creased now and all the crease is it holds the edge until a predetermined subdivision level and then lets it go so if you're trying to get a really tight edge you can crease it to hold that shape so when we see remesh with keep crease is on you can see that it held the edge of anywhere that had the crease enabled you can see these areas got messed up because the creases might have not been detected by the algorithm or just the geometry here is too much for it to handle lastly we have detect edges now all detect edges does is looks for 90 degree changes in the geometry and will create subgroups out of those transitions so to demonstrate this let's go down to polygroup and we're just going to do a group visible so this is all one polygroup and then we're going to go ahead and turn on detect edges and z-remesh you can see that it kept all of our polygroups and just using that 90 degree information on this particular model did a pretty good job of z remission it too you can see it kept a lot of the areas here very clean very sharp with even distribution of polygons now where this did not work is this angle that we have in the back you can see since this wasn't a 90 degree angle didn't really know what to do and so it did the best it could but it's not as clean as the rest of the models so now that we understand these settings let's see if we can z-remesh this model to be clean so now that we know the transition between polygroups can really help the retopology the first thing we're going to do is isolate this major piece and we're going to go down to polygroups and we're going to group by normals and you can set this angle 45 is fine but what this did is it turned each side into its own polygroup and that's going to help us when we zero mesh so let's keep detect edges on and let's turn on keep groups let's z remesh you can see now that all of this is very clean we don't have any issues now looking over here you can see that we do have an issue in the corner down here [Music] and it looks like we have some issues with the shape the top and bottom of this piece here so let's undo and let's turn our smoothing groups to zero and try again now we're getting a clean result up top it looks clean on the bottom and these are staying rectangular like we wanted and the back still looks good so using these settings in conjunction with one another we were able to reach apologize this to very clean geometry you could reduce this further and use it for a game model you know you could re-subdivide this and continue sculpting on it for example we could go back and re-crease these edges and then subdivide a couple times and now we have a high poly model that we can sculpt on or if we want to add additional detail and this really just shows the power of zero measure and zbrush because this can save you a ton of time just dialing in these settings and z remeshing and getting really clean complex geometry all right that about wraps it up for zero mesher i hope that gave you a good overview of all the different features you can do with it and i tried to give you guys ways to think about how you might use these different features a lot of them are pretty self-explanatory and a lot of them just require some experimentation if there's anything you feel like i missed please let me know in the comments or if there's other topics about zbrush that you would like me to go over the same way that we did in this video also leave me a comment and maybe we'll add that to one of the future videos if you like this video please consider giving it a thumbs up and subscribing to the channel i really appreciate it and i will see you in the next one see you later you

Channel: hart

Views: 39,751

Keywords: art, game art, gaming, games, 3d, 3d art, digital art, stylized, stylized characters, character art, video game art, cg, computer graphics, cg art, art education, art tutorials, game art tutorials, sculpting, modeling, 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, digital sculpting, texturing, retopology, zbrush, substance, painter

Id: 0fEC6Tr9CC8

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021