From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

Dividing a model - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush 2020 Essential Training

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Dividing a model

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- [Narrator] One of the main interests you'll have when making 3D models in Zbrush is, how do you get more detail and resolution out of it? Now there're many ways to do this, but the classic method is by subdividing it. Let's see how subdivision works. Sow with this model that I have open, you can see that it's fairly low-resolution, especially if I turn on polyframe, you can see the wire frame page. Now just to demonstrate, let's say I want to sculpt some fine details on the wing, so I've got maybe a smaller brush size here, and if I want to sculpt some sort of veins on the wing, you'll notice that it's not really working very well, doesn't have a lot of geometry to work with. It's these few little vertices right here that are getting affected so definitely no room for fine detail. So let's go into geometry and click on divide and let's turn on the polyframe to see exactly what happened So I can switch between the subdivision levels with this slider here, or I can click on lower res or higher res. But basically what you're seeing is that every single polygon of this model got split into four smaller polygons. So now if you try to sculpt some detail, still not great but you can see there's a little bit more detail to work with. Now every time we add subdivision levels, it's going to increase the active polygon count and the total polygon count. So right now it's about 18000 points, which is actually kind of confusing, a lot of people think of this as 18000 polys. In most 3D software they count the number of polygons but Zbrush counts the number of points. There's usually about double the number of points in model than there are in polygons. So if you need to export a model to a certain polygon count, you'll want to think of this number as being in half. So actually it would be about 9000 polygons in this model. But if we go down one subdivision level, you can see now there's currently only about 4000 active points. So every time we increase the subdivision level, we divide one more time. It's quadrupling the number of active points . So let's divide a couple more times. So now we're a little over a million active points. Most computers should be able to handle this just fine. If we divide one more time you'll see we've got almost 5 million active points. This is the point where some computers start to slow down. I'm sure I could add one more subdivision , but that would probably be over kill even more detail than I need. So let's see what happens if we sculpt some detail now. Okay, so we definitely have enough geometry to hold that detail. So at any point you can go to any other subdivision levels that you have, and let's say you realize that you don't really need more detail than say subdivision level five, you can actually delete higher and that will just remove any higher subdivision levels and so that will save memory, it will save storage space and it might make you computer run faster too. Occasionally you might want to want to delete lower as well but there's really not so much of a reason to do that. But for if for some reason you do delete lower, you can actually recover those lower subdivision levels by clicking on reconstruct subdiv. So every time you click on this it's going to go back and reconstruct to what the mesh looks like before you deleted those lower subdivision levels. Okay, so that's the basics of creating , modifying and deleting subdivision levels in Zbrush. It's the foundation for a lot of detail work. So feel free to practice in case you're not entirely clear how it works.

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