Quote - That's a nice rebuild of James. Shane. Looks good.

My only niggle would be the inward facing kneecaps. 

Could you share your method of making meshes symmetrical again ?

I have my own method using some of Ockham's python scripts, but it takes a lot of manual work and is still not perfect.

Sometimes a vertice can get "stuck" if the mesh intersects, but this can be easily fixed with the smoothing brush.

Thanks for the compliments Joe. 

Yes, his knees are turned in too much. They're like that on the original shape too. I haven't done much sculpting work to most of his body yet. I Just did some smoothing through the shoulders, traps and a bit through the chest so far. Like I said he still needs a lot of work. Most of that pic is just scaling and posture in Poser.  His hips need reworking and there's some questionable muscle flow through his uppper thighs. But I want to get the rig adjusted before I do much reshaping. That probably sounds backwards, since it will just need more adjusting after, but I have my reasons. 

I fixed his symmetry in ZBrush. It requires some basic math, but basically, there's a feature in the deformations pallet called smart resym that helps with that. Depending on the quality of the mesh, it can be as quick as 5 minutes to fix, or you could struggle with it for hours. James was fixed in about 4 attempts, and less than 20 minutes.

As I recall you stated you stopped using ZB at v3, so I don't remember if 3 even had smart resym. I think it's been there for quite a while but I've been on 4+ since sometime in 2009/10 whenever it was released, so it's hard to even remember what ZB3 looked like, much less what features it had.

The geometry has to be consistent across the X axis in order for that feature to work tho, so some meshes, such as G2 Sydney, won't work because the left side of her chest is damaged due to some seriously sloppy production work and lack of quality control. (Sorry G2 creators - whoever they are - but I call it as I see it). Edges are merged, so the polys are actually non-existant so there's nothing that can be... re-symetrified ? - and I think I just created a new word there. G2 Jessi doesn't have this issue as far as I recall (and her rigging is much better than Sydneys, making her a better candidate for rebuild work anyway). 

Worst case scenario, you split the model in half and mirror it. This can be done in ZB too, and retain all your groups. Then it will definitely work. But so long to all your morphs, and your UV maps have to be mirrored now too. 

Keep in mind also, that many of the older Poser meshes can't be worked in ZBrush due to their inconsistent geometry, N-Gons, stray verts, etc. The P4 baby, for example, has N-Gons. ZB spits these out automatically, even via using GoZ. It gives you the option to rebuild the faulty faces with tris or quads, but either way the mesh will be broken back in Poser. You can morph it, and then try transfering the morphs in Poser via one of the various python scripts, but results will vary.

This is one of the reasons why it's so important to keep your mesh all quads, or at least quads and tris. N-Gons are bad for most any modeling app. 

There is a ZBrush plug-in for Poser that helps with keeping groups and vert orders intact, but again, results vary. And I'm not even sure if it is built for any version of ZB prior to 4r4 or so, but not sure about that cause I don't even know who wrote it. 

Quote - BTW, unless you drastically reworked the shape of the head, all the three "morph projection" scripts (Cage's python script, D3D's morphing clothes and the PP-2014 morph transfer) should be able to rebuild the expression files quickly, no matter the changes you made to the geometry.

I'll keep that in mind. I prefer to use projection morphing in ZB tho, as I have more control over it than what any script would allow, and I can modify them as needed, while I'm projecting them. Scripts can be a decent starting point though. But, especially with James, a lot of his expression morphs just look retarded and need reworking anyway. Same is true for a lot of other figures. 

 

~Shane