ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ Importing and Preparing a Mesh for Sculpting 91

into a tight area like this can be tricky, not to mention time-consuming,
if you have to repeatedly mask the ears each time you want to work
around them.

You can select two different selection brushes from the Brush menu. These
brushes include Select Lasso and Select Marquee. Select Marquee will draw
a rectangular selection when you press Ctrl+Shift. Select Lasso allows you to
draw an irregular selection area. You can further control the type of stroke for
these selection brushes under the Stroke menu while holding Ctrl+Shift. I prefer
to maintain the default Select Lasso and Select Marquee assigned to hotkeys.

To polygroup the ear, follow these steps:

1. From the Brush menu select the SelectLasso brush. Begin by hiding
   the faces using Ctrl+Shift-drag to create a hide marquee. Around
   the head faces, hide until just the ears are visible. Since this head is
   symmetrical, you can enable X Symmetry and any faces hidden on
   one side will be hidden on the other.


2. Once the ears are visible, choose Tool → Polygroups and click
   Group Visible (Figure 3.20). Hiding faces like this is easier with the
   Select Lasso brush. This allows you to make irregular-shaped selec-
   tions instead of using only a marquee. When hiding faces with
   Show Hide Marquee, it can be easier if you turn on Pt Sel (Point
   Select found under the Transform menu. This will cause any face
   from which you select one vertex to be hidden. Point Select is in the
   Transform menu.


3. The ear is now polygrouped. To see this, Ctrl+Shift-drag in the
   document window to Reveal All again. Now press Shift+F to enter
   Frame mode and you can see the different-colored faces for the two
   polygroups (Figure 3.21).
   It will be useful to have the ring of faces around the ear sepa-
   rated from the ear and head for more flexibility when working on
   this area. To accomplish this, hide the faces of the head so that only
   the ear is visible.


4. Hide the ring of faces around the ear. Once the faces are hidden, you
   can invert what is visible on screen by Ctrl+Shift-dragging a marquee
   in the document window. This will show the previously hidden parts.
   Since the head is grouped separately from the outer ear ring, you can
   hide the head by Ctrl+Shift-clicking the head mesh. Now only the
   outer ear ring is visible. Assign this a new polygroup by choosing
   To ol → Polygroups → Group Visible. Figure 3.22 shows the ear and
   its individual polygroups.
   Now you can easily mask the ear area by hiding the head using
   Ctrl+Shift-click. Only the head is visible; the ear is now hidden. Ctrl-
   click-drag a masking marquee to mask these faces (Figure 3.23). Invert
   the mask by Ctrl-clicking the background to keep the head masked and
   the ear unmasked.
   By masking the ear, you can sculpt against the back of the ear, or
   by masking the head, you can easily modify the ear and move it without

Figure 3.19 When using the Move

brush on an unmasked ear, you change

the ear as well as the faces of the head.

Figure 3.20 The ear faces isolated

Figure 3.21 Polygrouped ear faces