Tips and tricks with ZRemesher - ZBrush Tutorial

- [Narrator] ZRemesher is a powerful tool to retopologize your mesh while maintaining fidelity to your original model. First let me demonstrate how it works, and then offer a few tips when you use it. As you can see, I changed my UI a little bit so we can see the active and total points count on the top here. And what we're going to do is bring our light box by hitting comma. And then we're going to go into the projects, or demo projects right here. And then select this big guy here, so Kotelnikoff. So as you can see right now there's a lot of points in this guy. So there's active points, 1.2 million and total points 3.1 million. So we can definitely use ZRemesher to retopologize this little guy here. So let's bring up ZRemesher by double clicking on the side here. And I'm going to go in the tools. And then I'm going to scroll down to geometry. And then scroll down until I see ZRemesher. So the basics of ZRemesher are very, very simple. So let's go ahead and ZRemesh this guy. So we have here five thousand polygons count that we're going to target. And because it's on adaptive density, it means it's going to try to get as close as possible to 5000, but if it needs more it's going to add more. So let's go ahead and do ZRemesher. Okay, so as we can see right now, this is looking somewhat okay. So you can always undo and start over, and basically change the options here. So let's take a look at the options. So if we unclick adapt, it means that the Zremesh is going to be at 5000 here in the active points. So if we want to do half of the 1.2 million, we click on half. The same and retopologize the actual model but maintain the same active points, we click on same. And you can double as well. So if you want to change the number or the target of polygons count, and this is by thousands, you can actually slide this guy into whatever you want. And then click adapt to make sure that it's as close as possible to this. And then go ahead and do the ZRemesh again. So as you can see, we have something that is a little bit better than the last time. And we have 20 thousand as opposed to 14 thousand. Again, it always tries to be as close as possible. But if it needs more, it's going to add more polygons. Now if we take a look at the adaptive size, basically adaptive size is how many square polygons the algorithm is going to try to reach for. So basically this works as almost a person to show. If you bring it down to zero, it's going to be as squarish as possible. If you bring it down to 100, you're going to let ZBrush decide how many square and how many polygons that you're going to have in your topology. So I always leave it at 50 and play with the other options. But if you want to have more square, you're going to get results that are like this. So let's go ahead and take a look at a few tips when you use ZRemesher. You can always undo everything. So if you're not satisfied, undo, change the options, and try again. If you're working on a model with symmetry on like this, make sure you leave symmetry on when you remesh. If your remesh model is a bit weird, you can use a second option without, and clicking ZRemesher. Always try to retopologize a mesh that is clean and without holes and imperfections. If you have any holes, use the close holes feature before using ZRemesher. Also, when you use ZRemesher, you may need to play with the options to get the best results. Especially as you get into a lower number of polygons, you may need to get started from a different subdivision. So in this case here, we are at 12. So let's go ahead and undo twice. And if we take a look at our geometry, we are at six subdivisions. So we could basically start at a lower subdivision if we'd like to. So maybe a four might be a better option before we actually do the ZRemesh. So let's go and bring up ZRemesher again. And ZRemesh, and let's bring it back to 5000, and ZRemesh again. And actually he looks worse. So in this case, it may not be an option. Again, play with the option and subdivision. And make sure that you get started from a clean one to get the best results. But you can always undo. Also, if you're having weird results, try to smooth out your mesh with the smooth brush before you actually do the ZRemesher. So for example, there might be an opportunity to smooth out the surface here, and so on and so forth.