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Render Meshes ??

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Regarding fist thread on fine skinning.
Have done a little more thinking[a dangerous thing]
My quest at the mo is to produce super fine mesh versions of pose[s] taken from Vicki 3 in poser.
Firstly if some of my questions etc seem ill-informed it is because I am a
beginner at this .
The reason I want fine meshes is for producing resin models using sterolithography with modded poser figs is the base model for the STL files.

The poser figs when viewed as plain old meshes represent surfaces as facets of varying size depending on the level of surface modeling detail
required.
whilst this faceted surface does have its charm, I would like to be able to have the choice of a fare less faceted surface.

I have experimented with subdivision etc.
This so far does not achieve my ends.

Now a question that springs to mind is this.
Render meshes.
What are they?
Are they a fine mesh skin for instance?
seems that in Zbrush you can view a ‘skin’ of fine polygons.
Rhino mentions a fine polygon mesh is generated for rendering.
When this [rendering] is shown as smooth in rhino, does that mean a mesh
that represents the smooth surface can be generated somehow??
Is it possible?
Creating a mesh ‘skin’ in the manner that smooth renders are created over more course polygon structures?
If it is possible I would love to be able to create and save such fine polygon structures

Am I completely off base here? [I am a beginner to this after all]

Views?

Cheers

Setmenu

#2

Poser figures, are designed for one purpose. Lowest poly counts. Download wings 3D(free program). Import the obj file into wings. Find some simple tutorials on cutting edges, joining vertecies, and smoothing in Wings. After creating the hi-res mesh you can export to ZBrush for further fine tunning, or go directly to Rhino, but remember to save the model as a DXF, because the last time I used Rhino, it did not support obj. Then in Rhino select the model, make sure it’s scale to the proper size and export it as an STL. Stone Cutter as had been said in your last post may be able to help. :slight_smile:

#3

It seems that you are getting confused by the two Smooth functions in ZBrush. While they have the same name, they each have a very different result.

Tool>Modifiers>Smooth creates what you are referring to as the “render mesh”. By default, it renders 9 polygons for every 1 real polygon. The settings next to the Smooth slider let you adjust this to be as high as 1024 rendered polygons for every 1 real one. BUT this only applies to the model when it is rendered in ZBrush. It does NOT affect the geometry of the model and so will do you no good with your STL work.

The other Smooth slider is located in Tool>Modifiers>Deformations. This slider does change your mesh geometry in that it averages adjacent vertices to create a more smooth surface. Combined with the Divide deformation, you will get the results that you are looking for.

Here’s how it works:

I started with a Sphere3D with very few polygons.

When you press Tool>Modifiers>Deformations>Divide, you are splitting every polygon into four.

However, no points are moved. As a result, every original facet remains visible even though they are each split when you look closely at them. That’s where the Tool>Modifiers>Deformations>Smooth slider comes into play.

When you use it (I recommend a value of 100), it will cause the center point of these new polygon clusters to be raised slightly while the original vertices are lowered slightly. This results in a smooth surface without the original facets.

And finally, here is the sphere with two more Divides and two more Smooths:

As you can see, using this approach will give you the kind of results that you are looking for. It will work regardless of whether your original model was created in ZBrush, Poser, Wingz, or some other application.

#4

aurick
Thanks for taking the time with your detailed reply.
But the process you describe is exactly what I have tried.
Tighter mesh but same surface facets.
Everyone recommends the division/smooth approach.
To no avail.
If you have poser grab a figure and try.

It,s driving me crazy now :mad:

I think that what I wish to achieve with poser figs ,just is not possible in the simple sense.

Cheers

Setmenu

#5

I’m afraid that I don’t understand.

This is a Poser 3 mesh.

Here’s what I did:

  1. The original mesh was imported and drawn on the left.

  2. I Divided the mesh three times. After each time, I did a Smooth deformation at 100. The result is the center view.

  3. On the right without the PolyFrame view. Since I didn’t feel like doing a couple more Divides, I activated the Smooth modifier to a value of 1 with its default settings. The same result could have been achieved by dividing and smoothing twice more. (The more times you repeat the Divide and Smooth process, the smoother the mesh will be.)

As you can clearly see, the facets were removed completely.

For STL purposes you need to go a couple of times higher than I did. Your main limitations with this will be the amount of RAM that you have and your processor speed. Practically, though, don’t expect the current version of ZBrush to go past 250,000 polygons.

#6

Aurick
I agree that the simple figs smooth ok, but
Victoria 3 is more problematic.

Anyway enough of that and…
YIPPEEEEE :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:
care of Anim8or :smiley:
I don’t now exactly what it has done but
by importing an obj file and pressing ‘make subdivided’ them ‘make mesh’ has produced
a mesh of the smooth render not the big facets.
This equals a 240 meg obj file and an Stl file with 23 million poylgons.

Now that’s more like it!!
You have to zoom in a long way to see facets
and they look nice anyway.

Cheers for your last piece of advice it helped my thinking a great deal.

Setmenu