ZBrushCentral

How do I make a deep cavity in the mouth?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’ve been working on a Zsculpt of Yoda for ages now. I can’t for the life of me get enough polygons in his mouth area to knock a deep enough cavity suitable enough to make his inner mouth area. The artificial shadow that appears in this area doesn’t help.
I’ve thought of things to try like deleting that inner mouth area at the lips and sculpting the inner mouth with a polysphere and morphing it into the sculpt at the lips edges. I also am slightly worried about doing this, fearing that the retopo work wont let me go into his mouth area- unless you can mask while doing retopo. I honestly don’t know.

There has to be a better way. I was wondering what would be best rather then making several mistakes trying to do it without the knowledge

#2

You can turn off the preview shadow. Also, you can hide parts of the mesh while doing topolology. In doing this, you could more easily reach that area without having to stand on your head to see inside the mouth. :lol: I’ve only had to do this once, so I’m not really sure if there’s any bugginess to hiding in topology for 3.1. I have heard someone say something about it. That was 3.0 though. Anyway, hope it helps.

#3

One way to create that interior cavity is through edge loops. What you do is hide everything except the polygons that will become the back of the mouth. Then you use Tool>Deformation>Offset to move those polygons toward the interior a little bit. Now press Tool>Geometry>Edge Loop. This constructs new polygons between the original position of the visible polys and their new position. Hide those new polys (so that just the back of mouth ones are visible again) and repeat your deformation/edge loop.

After a few steps of this you can show the entire mesh again. You’ll now have the head, the insides of the mouth, and the back of the mouth. Time to start moving polys, and sculpting lips, etc. :slight_smile:

Once you’ve mastered the Edge Loop method of creating polygons, you can actually get pretty fancy. You could create the lips with your first use, then enlarge the area for the second use to create the back (gums) side of the lips. Then more edge looping to create this mouth chamber that’s larger than the initial polygons were. You could even finish off by using edge looping to create the teeth inside the mouth. It takes practice, but you’ll be amazed by what you can do!

#4

Thanks for the tips and methods. That edge looping technique sounds like it could do wonders for the ear issues I’m also dealing with.

I’m still using 3.0- The user comments regarding 3.1 scared me away from it- the smooth brush issues more than anything else.

I thinking about trying another way. ESB Yoda was a latex skin resting over a fiberglass armature. The lips are pretty thick but the eyelids are not.

I guess I should mask or topog the entire mesh, ignoring/deleting the open area in the mouth, and the area in the eyes where the eyeball would be. I could extract a mesh from either method with a certain level of thickness. One that would be close to the thin thickness of the eyelids edges, and then somehow thicken up the lip area.