Zremesher ignoring guides with curve strength at 100

[Alex_Weber]

I’ve been working on a sculpt for some time. Ive gotten to the point where I want to use z remesh to clean up the topology. Unfortunately even though I have curve strength set to 100 and retopology guides everywhere, the program completely ignores them. My remesh looks identical when the curve strength is 0 or 100.

Before I couldn’t get it to remesh at 100 strength as I was getting errors that it failed and would stop.

I tested and the remesher guides work fine on other sculpts, and on the current sculpt its fine when there is only 1 or a few guides.

I have quite a few guides, could that be the problem?

Im in zbrush 2021.6.2

[Spyndel]

Hello @Alex_Weber ,

@Alex_Weber

I have quite a few guides, could that be the problem?

Yes

ZRemesher guides are meant to be quick suggestions for general polyflow, and become less effective the more there are. You cannot draw elaborate topology with the guides.

You are attempting to create hard surface topology with ZRemesher which is more challenging than organic geometry. For the best results if you know you’re working towards this goal you should be working in the things ZRemesher will need to be able to find the edges as part of your process.

In this case that means polygroups. Your form is probably too soft and complicated for “Detect Edges” to work well, and your topology is not accurate enough for well defined creasing. This means you’ll need to group each plane on the surface as a separate polygroup and use the “Keep Groups” option with ZRemesher. ZRemesher will then draw clean lines along each polygroup border.

However, again your topology is not precise enough to really cleanly define polygroups on that mesh, which will impact the quality of the results you get. You may wish to consider manually retopologizing this mesh with the ZModeler Edge extrude and surface snapping functions.

[tobor8man]

To add to @Spyndel 's advice, you could use the slice brush with curve, rectangle, circle strokes to slice up your original mesh. That way you can make clean polygroup borders that don’t rely on the original topology. Just slice away and then regroup the bits as required. ZRemesh with Keep Groups as suggested.

[Alex_Weber]

Thank you both! I ended up using mainly polygroupit with poly paint and I had much better results than before.