From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Activating DynaMesh - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

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Activating DynaMesh

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- [Instructor] DynaMesh is on of the main modes of working in ZBrush. And it's totally different from subdivision, or ZModeller, or workflows. Basically it works by breaking a model down into little boxes like 3D pixels. It's kind of hard to put into words so let's just get right into the demonstration. So let's say you got a model and you want to make some big sculpting changes to it. Maybe you want to bring out the ears and make the ears just really big. And so let's just go head and stretch these out. Now what you'll notice is that it's really starting to stretch out these polygons. They're getting really pulled. And you can sort of get around this by subdividing. If I just hit Ctrl + D a couple times. You'll notice, you know, you can kind of get some of that smoothness back but it's always going to be an issue. For example if you try to sculpt on this with a standard brush for example, b + s + t. You know, you can kind of sculpt here but when you try to sculpt on these areas, things get a little bit strange. So a solution for this is to use DynaMesh. So let's go down to our Geometry sub-palette. And let's open up DynaMesh. So there's several options here, but the two most important ones are the Resolution and then the DynaMesh button which actually initializes it. So let's just see what happens if we use the default resolution. So real quick about this pop-up, if your model has subdivision levels, it's going to ask you if you would like to freeze subdivision levels. This is kind of a advanced, complicated thing. I always do NO here. Okay so let's take a look at what this did our wireframe. I'll hit Shift + F to turn our wireframe. So you can see that it's basically evened out the entire topology into little squares and triangles. Now if I hit Ctrl + Z to show what that looked like before, you can see we had more of a animation type topology. And then Ctrl + Shift + Z to go forward in the undo. This is what it looks like after DynaMesh. So let's undo this and try a different resolution. So let's try something a little lower. Maybe about 72. And then we'll just hit no again. And so you can see it now all of these polygons are quite a bit bigger because it's lower resolution. If we undo this again, you could've cranked this up quite high and if you go really high you might end up crashing your computer. So I recommend stepping up, maybe doubling each time, just to make sure you're not over-taxing your computer. Now one thing to keep in mind is that DynaMesh is size-dependent. So if we go to the Size sub-palette here, you can see that the height of this model is about 4.5 units tall. Now ZBrush likes to work with objects that are in the range of roughly 1 - 5 units tall. When you can have a model of any size, but DynaMesh in particular really likes models to be in the neighborhood of 1 - 5 units tall. So what happens if we shrink this model way down. And let's try on Solo mode to hide those eyes for right now. We shrink this model down to maybe like .1 then we go back to DynaMesh. And we use that same resolution that was on by default, it's 128. And let's zoom in here on this. Just hit F to zoom in. Now let's do DynaMesh again. And click NO. So you'll notice that this model is much smaller. And so the resolution is much lower. So this is something to keep in mind, to check the size of your model. If it's really small, you might want to increase that resolution really high. Now if you have a really large model, say over 30, 40 units in maximum dimension, then you're going to want to set that DynaMesh resolution really low. Okay so those are the basics of DynaMesh. You can see it's really good for evening out topology. And it actually does a lot more. We'll get into that later on in this chapter.

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