Hello,
I have trousers exported from Marvelous Designer.
Because they haven’t any thickness like I am used to have in zBrush, they are a bit hard to sculpt realistically.
Is there a recommended workflow?
Attached some screenshots.
Thanks for any tips on this
As you note, Zbrush prefers closed meshes with a bit of thickness for best results in most situations. In addition, the optimal topology for sculpting or painting in zbrush is evenly distributed quads, as close to square shaped as possible. So you will have to do a bit of work on your mesh to get it into Zbrush’s sweet spot.
The first thing to do is get it a bit of thickness. If it were lower poly you could use Zmodeler to extrude the polygons, but with a fairly dense mesh like this Mesh Extracts are probably your best bet. Simply perform the operation on the entire mesh (don’t need to partially mask), and then accept after you find the settings that work for you in order to create an entirely new subtool of the mesh generated with thickness. Your original mesh will be unaltered.
I am slightly concerned about the way the belt loops are joined to the mesh–this may produce odd results in that location, but we’ll hope for the best.
Next you ideally want to clean up that topology for best results. A quick ZRemesher pass should do the trick. Your only goal here is to get topology adequate for sculpting. There’s not a lot of detail on your garment yet, so a medium-ish target polycount setting should be sufficient. You may need to then further subdivide the mesh to increase its resolution high enough for fine detail.
As a faster alternative, simply Dynameshing the resulting extract would be a faster way to rapidly make the topology adequate for sculpting. You may prefer to work on your mesh at a single level of subdivision for easy use with topology altering tools like dynamesh or Sculptris Pro, and this would be the fastest way to jump right into doing that. But at some point, for best results sculpting fine detail, painting, texture export, or posing, you are still going to want to clean that topology up further with Zremesher or otherwise, and transition to a mutliple subdivision level process.
Finally, be aware of the Brush > Automasking > Backface Masking feature, as it may help you to sculpt on sections of the mesh where the front and rear surfaces are very close together, without affecting the rear facing surface. If that doesnt work for a given situation, the foolproof way to protect a mesh section from being affected is to hide it. This is much easier if your mesh is divided into well defined polygroups.
