Hi PaQ,

> Well I don't know if it's a variation of catmull of not, but the
> result is quite close ...

It looks like there you are using the ZBrush Divide too, with the Smt "Subdivide smooth modifier" option enabled. Yes that is catmull clark (or a close equivalent).

If you already have your shape in the proper form you should turn the smooth modifier off so that it does not modify the shape of your object by shrinking it down.


But I see now that one of my assumptions of how ZBrush worked was wrong - I just assumed that as you painted it would automatically subdivide polygons down as needed to get more detail in a small localized area (maybe there is an option to enable this?)


But again your example there is mixing in catmull-clark style sub-d where it is not needed.

If you want to have a rounded box from your MoI data, then put a fillet on the box inside of MoI so that it has a rounded shape when you export the data into ZBrush and if you need to subdivide further, don't use the smooth modifier.


Once you have a bunch of small polygons, the actual brush stroke displacement action in ZBrush does not work fundamentally better on quads instead of triangles - all it cares about is that you have things diced up into small regular sized pieces.


For example with Olga's ring if you dice things down into small polygons at export time from MoI using "Divide larger than", that contains a mixture of quads and triangles in it, but you can apply brush strokes and reliefs on it totally fine, the triangles do not behave in some bad way compared to quads as you are displacing things.


I can see that you will want quads if you want to use the displacement to really radically change the shape of the object, like grow a long set of horns out of it or something like that, in a case like that you are kind of doing modeling as well and I can see there that having quads will be helpful since you're pretty much doing box modeling in that case and you will probably want to do Catmull-Clark style subdivision which goes along well with box modeling.

The kind of detailing that would tend to be done with MoI exports is not like that at all - you're not using the brushing as a kind of fundamental full model shaping tool but instead to apply smaller fine details. In this case, things do not need to work like box modeling and instead just the plain displacement is being used. This use does not need to have quads only - triangles works fine for this type of use, the thing you want is evenly sized polygons for this and not quads only.


I can see this in action pretty easily with Olga's ring - after exporting a diced up mesh out of MoI it behaves fine for adding details in ZBrush even though there are triangles in it.

- Michael