zRemesher.... wow

I know this is blender discussion. This week I did some retopo practice and in two hours I had a character with ~ clean topology, now I saw this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVoFi2mnyhA , anyone thinks this needs to be in other suits too? Not just Zbrush? I mean I’ve ZBrush anyway, but it’s ridiculously hard to use compared to sculptris, blender, 3ds max or even maya.

Yep, use it all the time. As a general rule of thumb, I have noticed few 3d suits put much focus on the retopology pipeline, often they opt to do the bare minimum and leave it at that. I believe its in part due to their focus on film focuses as opposed to the importance of the greater pipeline.

That said, the best 3d suit with retopo tools is probably Modo, otherwise the specialty apps still reign supreme (3d coat, topogun, zbrush). Pixologic is doing a great job at what they do and the pipeline in question though, so at least such alternatives exist. Its also not easy to do such smart automatic topology features, clearly pixologic decided its development was worth the resources, and im glad they did.

As for zbrush being ridiculously hard to use… its not. It has the same issue Blender has, which is that it spits in the face of convention. Zbrush actually has some logic to its design choices though…header is everything, laid out in alphabetical order with categories. Everything else is just a dock for elements in those categories. Some stuff is fairly standard, shift to snap, buttons for orthographic or perspective view, w-e-r keys for scale, rotate…ect. Its very tool focused. The unique stuff is usually something like the transpose tool, which is a 3 point widget along a line, which is used to scale rotate move…ect. Once you get used to it, its easy.

I find zBrush strange to use and hard to get used to, that’s why I don’t use it and call it hard, but this thing was absolutely amazing. I’ve always wanted simillar thing to be implemented to blender (remesh is different)

Spend a few weeks with it and it will be second nature. Its hard because its different, not because its badly designed. This just highlights the importance of convention.

Personally I really hate using Zbrush. I only use it because it is so insanely powerful but I would love to have a sculpting software as capable as Zbrush with the usability of 3D Coat or Mudbox. That would be a dream come true for me.

Anyway zRemesher is great but if you need a mesh to be animated then you need to retopo it manually. No automated function will be able to produce a good enough mesh to be used in production.

Zbrush has a perfectly fine UI. The only thing I dislike about it is viewport navigation. I can never quite put the model at just the right angle in a single click like I can in Blender.

Yeah the viewport navigation in Zbrush is one of my biggest pet-peeves as well. You can kinda get it to behave the same way as normal 3D applications by locking the viewport rotation to the Y-axis, however you also have to play with the “Local transformations” settings as well or Zbrush may actually lock itself to only rotate on one axis and this is something that you may have to do every time you change between orthographic an perspective view. It’s annoying as hell!

UI isn’t that bad, but when I started to use Blender first day I was able to move properly, manipulate objects, do a lot of stuff in edit mode and tons after tons of other stuff at the meantime zBrush first day gave me few questions on why base meshes are called “tools” and how in the god’s sake I navigate here. :smiley: I can perfectly wield 3ds max, Maya, 3d coat, blender of course, and many many more, but zBrush is just useless in this case.

Now back to the topic. Why wouldn’t auto retopo work for animations? o.O

Loops just aren’t in the right places. If you are retopoing something static like, say, a rock you made with dynamesh: as long as it’s made of a reasonable number of quads, whatever topology it spits out is probably good enough. You just need to be able to UV it and not blow the poly budget. But that’s not going to work for an animated character. You need loops in very specific places where muscles deform, around joints, etc.

Also, Zremesher sometimes has a nasty habit of spitting out long spiraling edge loops instead of multiple parallel edge loops.

The guides brush zremesher has can help with both situations, but it sometimes it’s just not good enough.

As you said guides can increase detail in certain spots, while not photoreallistic animation, this should do everything pretty well - maybe there will be few deformation issues but in the final render they are almost invisible. I’d prefer that over hours spent on “improving” topology. Now spirals, yes. But not that perfect retopo gives you those too, so why bother? Yes unwrapping will annoy you but that’s nothing again compared to the process of retopo.

I mean I’ve ZBrush anyway, but it’s ridiculously hard to use compared to sculptris, blender, 3ds max or even maya.

acctualy to do work really nice work. The amount of knowloadge needed. in zbrush is really samall smaller then 3ds max smaller then maya… blender… Sculptris is just tech demo.

all sculpt apps are more easy then poly modelling aps…
To some level. because makeing photorealistic image of someone is really hard and needs a lot of practise

to all people saying Zbrush UI is crap etc… whata helll…

U first learned to use ther type of UI other way of thinking about working pypline. Zbrush have diffrent. And once u learn it and spend time with it. u start to see that it is really a good idea and one of the best UI on the market.

A simple tool for laying out areas on your mesh that MUST be concentric circles or MUST be a series of edge loops along a cylinder would make ZRemesher 99% usable for animation. As is, even with ZGuides and the guide adhesion at 100% you still get spirals on arms/legs and around eyes/mouth, especially if you try to go high poly with it. I feel the ZB people know this and I have to assume that it will be addressed in the next updates. This is the ONLY feature I want out of the remeshing GSoC this year.

I wonder what one of the next GSOC projects means with “Interactive Quadrilateral Remeshing”.

In the GSoC ideas page it says:

Quad Dominant remeshing modifier Note, this was a previous GSOC project which didn’t end up being usable, but still an important modifier, this is an advanced project

So I guess it was GSoC 2010, Rohith B V worked on Quad remeshing:

UI must be simple and easy to learn, I find ZB UI bad for this. While zremesher won’t make nice topology it will give a nice mesh, it’s remesh not retopo.

I use zbrush all the time, years now.
Regarding z remesher:
On a portrait (example)
It works well producing a 4 -10 K base. Trying for less density results to not great bases.
Supposing that you need a base mesh for multires sculpting. Actually, this is the point of pixologic. Animation needs another treatment, obviously.
My point here is: such 5-10k base meshes, with endless loops around (on a portrait!) will never work as base for our blender multires modifier. Good bye performance.
A bit out of this topic. A good opportunity to ask for a better multires modifier, right?
Another possible pipeline (zb+blender) is facing a dead end.
You may like or not the zb UI, however, it is your best multires-based sculpting option.

It’s powerful, I’ve got nothing against that. Now poly count - while most of my low poly hand modelling (like robots, mechanical stuff with totally no bevel :/) take over 40 000 verts, 5k - 10k is really great.

Mechanical stuff is not going for serious multires sculpting though.
To have a a base mesh for up to millions of faces (multires) is different.

wow exept the ugly spiral loops.
wow exept wrong edge loop position.

but yeah…wow…

Yeah, a possible workflow could be like:
working with dynamesh, up to 1 M.
Fast auto retopology (z remesher), subd and project (shrinkwrapping), keeps a very nice topology flow.
So, up to million faces. Great.
What comes next depends on your needs.
There is a misunderstanding on these autoretopo tools. Sometimes.
IMO it is not our final topology, in most cases.
To use guides for autoretopo is a nice addition. A little useless though.
Let me explain further.

My wish always was:
to be able to construct the loops I need, then ask for auto fill the rest.
Such an approach is almost what I do in blender retopology.
You may use gridfill, or better just F and use knife.

I even found myself adding topology (extrudes) on the base, under multires modifier. LOL
LOL because it is on your own risk and tricky. (totally smooth and resculpt by example)

BTW
About static assets like rocks etc.
Rocks love triangles, not quads.
So, using the new features in dyntopo-blender, constant remeshing (floodfill), have a low poly cage.
Blender provides the CTRL+click, selecting the shorter path, easy to assign seams then.
It is the quasi auto retopology (LOL) method.
Really effective for rocks or even ancient ruins (capitals of columns etc)

Many ways to skin a cat, z remesher is a fine tool among other workflows.
One for sure, try to edit a z autoretopology, you are losing your time.