#Zbrush polygroups software#

Only one Subtool can be active at a time, and this is the one that you can sculpt. Each piece is known as a subtool, and is managed in the toolbar shown below:įor instance if you had a character, his body could be one subtool, his helmet a different one, his sword another and so on. Tools such as characters, mechanical objects etc can become complicated and it is often easier to construct them from separate pieces rather than as a single whole. In this image, if you clicked on the large white Polysphere button it would open up a list of premade primitives in ZBrush such as spheres and cubes which are then ready to be sculpted. Make PolyMesh3D is an important button to know – when you first load a tool and want to start sculpting, you must click this to make it deformable. Note that when you export, you can choose only the selected subtool as an obj file. obj files from other 3d packages, or save them out. ‘ Load Tool‘ and ‘ Save As‘ allow you to load and save tools in progress, such as characters, objects etc. When you first open Zbrush, the only thing visible is the Tool column, as shown below:įrom here, you can add tools to your canvas, either starting from scratch, from opening a pre-existing one. I wonder if you plan to handle sculpt layers similarly, i.e.Every model you sculpt in Zbrush is considered a ‘tool’. This means the transform tools can be unaware of shape keys, and topology changing tools must only preserve per vertex customdata. The most similar thing we have to sculpt currently is shape keys, and to edit those we basically replace the vertex coordinates with the shape key on entering edit mode, and then sync things back on exit or when switching active shape key. That would avoid the hashing, which I expect to be rather slow and memory intensive.

#Zbrush polygroups software#

Is having a layer exist for only part of the vertices really important, is that how other software works? I was expecting sculpt layers to exist for all vertices. It’s reasonable to ignore that for now though and make one case work well first. The proposal mostly deals with the dynamic topology bmesh case I think, it’s not entirely clear to me how it extends to multires for example. The main complexity here is dealing with the different mesh representations, there are regular meshes, multires meshes and dyntopo bmeshes. Write to disk, Expose to UI and Create the UI To be continued in part 2 (the focus of further research and investigation) when exiting sculpt mode delete CustomData and rewrite it to match current layer data.when entering sculpt mode delete all layer data and restore it from CustomData.vert creation causes addition to the GHash and layers.ĭecide to which layer to add by checking proximity to other vert layers.vert deletion causes removal from GHash and layers.(its faster that iterating over the entire mesh) To mask a layer iterate over the layer and use BM_ELEM_CD_SET_FLOAT to set desired mask value for the vert. Create a GHash where the key is a vert pointer and the value a list of layer indexes that belong to this vert.Sculpt layers must survive/work with dynotopo. Users may mask/unmask these sculpt layers, for the purpose of working with large complicated meshes more easily. Sculpt layers will be arbitrary selections of verts that are stored.