CAN I RETOPO MY SCULPTING IN ZBRUSH OR DO I HAVE TO GO TO A THIRD PARTY APP?

Mat Wilson, Cheshire

Zbrush has had a retopology system for quite some years, but it has never really been adopted by the mainstream CG community. Not everyone is aware that Zmodeler contains enough tools to actually do a really good job of retopologising even the most complex of models.

You will need a basic knowledge of how Zmodeler works, but it’s not that difficult to learn. You can activate it with keyboard strokes if needed. B for Brush, Z for any brushes starting with Z, and then M for Zmodeler. Once it’s activated, if you hover over any of the three component types you get access to a set of tools and features broken down into actions, target and then modifiers. It does feel a little clumsy on your first go, but once you understand how it works it becomes as second nature as sculpting.

There are quicker, more automated ways to make clean topology in Zbrush but retopologising has distinct advantages. Zremesher is an industry renowned process to generate topology with a single click, and it does have some control of where the loops go with another feature called Zremesher Guides. However, it is still nowhere near as accurate as being able to map out your topology by hand. With the Zmodeler method you use the point, edge and face components to extrude out edges and have them adhere to the surface of your high-polygon sculpt. You can snap points and edges together and even define polygroups to polyloops to make selection a breeze.

Using Zmodeler, you can change modifiers to make things snap to a surface, or have them just move freely in 3D space. Of course, the important part of retopology is having things snap to another model, so we need that setting on for most of the retopology session. If you begin to like this method of retopology, you can assign all of these features to a new brush and even save that out as a Retopology brush. When you want to do retopology you can then simply load your own custom brush with all these settings already applied.