Hope I can explain here good. I have been doing meshes (bodies) in Zbrush to export to Blender, but I rather use Blender to do the complete simple body of a cartoon, but it seems that there is not enough mesh using the cube to make the bones move the mesh correctly. In Zbrush my characters had enough mesh all over the body to make good transformation, but never could get the export to blender to land on a all zero location to Blender.
If I do a simple cartoon using cubes, it seems that the bones do not grab the mesh proberly, I have to go in and put more cuts all along the body. If I do a sub division on this body, will that add more meshes so that the bones act accordingly, or do I have to add more geometry?
I don’t know where is the problem between zbrush <-> blender, as i don’t have zbrush , but for the question it’s much better to add edges where required manually before parenting the model to the armature.
An example of why :
I have a Cube, i extrude it
I make a 3 bones armature for it
I copy both Cube and armature, and for the copy i make a loop cut on the duplicated cube that will be exactly at the level of the bones connections
Now i give exactly the same pose to both armature
As expected, the duplicated cube deform a lot better.
Now to test your subsurf idea, i add a subsurf modifier on top of the modifier stacks (so above of the armature modifier) for both models
Again, the modified cube deform much better
Then i move the subsurf modifier on the bottom of the modifier stack (so under the armature modifier)
Same, the modified cube still deform much better
The subsurf is only a nice complement, it can’t replace you adding edges around the bones articulations.
Now Blender got recently a very good function, the Skin modifier.
It can allow you to build easily and quickly a base model, and one of the features of the Skin modifier is that it can automatically generate an armature for this model that will fit it very nicely, maybe you should give it a try, it is very good (though as usual for everything it needs a bit of practice).
Fred2 my problem in Zbrush is when I use zspheres, I tend to rotate them causing the mess not to be straight, that is one problem, the other one is when I make my mesh in zbrush, the mesh is not position correctly, so when I bring that to Blender the mess does is not centered on grid, I hear that when modeling in blender, the object should be on zero axis on all three x y and z…when I bring it from zbrush, the model is x-90 y-0 and z0.
