ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ Building Accessories with Topology Tools and Mesh Extraction 255

of the shape you need to create. To quickly generate new subtools from an existing high-res
model, you can use mesh extraction.
Mesh extraction will create new geometry based on a masked area of your tool. The higher
your subdivision level, the finer the mask will appear and the better the resulting extraction will
be. Extracted meshes are typically very dense and consist of only one subdivision level, so you
may decide to retopologize them later in the process to create a multilevel ZTool as well as mesh
that can be used outside ZBrush. Extracted meshes are fantastic for quickly generating complex
shapes especially with contained holes.
In this exercise, you’ll make a ragged shirt for this character using mesh extraction.

1. Select the body subtool of the character mesh. Hide all other subtools by clicking the
   eyeball icon next to the currently active subtool.


2. Make sure you are at the highest possible subdivision level and enable PolyPaint →^
   Colorize mode. Fill the mesh with a base color such as white, as shown in Chapter 5,
   “Texture Painting.” Change your active color to brown and begin painting a ragged
   shirt on the character (Figure 7.66).

We are using the Polypaint feature to create the shape of the shirt instead of masking it

directly. The reason is that we can easily save the polypaint and revisit the shirt design

later. A mask will be lost as soon as it is cleared unless it is saved in a texture map. Using

PolyPaint makes the process easier and more efficient.

Figure 7.66 Masking the shape of the shirt on the body. You’ll find Mask By

Intensity under the Masking menu.

3. Under Tool → Masking, click the Mask By Intensity slider to mask the areas you have
   polypainted. Turn off Colorize under the PolyPaint menu to see the mask.


4. Under Tool → Subtool, you will see the Extract button (Figure 7.67). Set the Thickness
   slider to 0.1. Set E Smt and S Smt to 0; these control the smoothing of the front and sides
   of the resulting mesh. Click the Extract button and a new subtool will be created based
   on the masked area (Figure 7.68). The surface can be smoothed and further sculpted.

Figure 7.67 The

mesh extraction

settings under

the Tool →

S ubTool m e n u