FiberMesh®

FiberMesh in Action

FiberMesh® is a specialized mesh generation tool. Unlike the Fiber material, FiberMesh is not a render process. Instead, FiberMesh creates real geometry on the fly which can be added to the existing model as a new SubTool.

You will find the FiberMesh controls in the Tool > FiberMesh sub-palette.

Depending on your settings within the FiberMesh sub-palette, you can generate totally different shapes for fibers, hair, fur and even vegetation. Thanks to these fibers being a real geometry, you then have the ability to sculpt your hairs with ZBrush’s powerful feature set. This includes the default sculpting brushes, Masks, TransPose, etc. as well as being able to paint them through the PolyPaint system. There are also a number of specialist “Groom” brushes designed specifically for use with the FiberMesh feature.

Of course, because these fibers are real geometry, they are also able to be exported to your application of your choice. Export the fiber geometry with or without UVs where each fiber will allow a texture to be applied to the individual fibers.
FiberMesh geometry is optimized for performance which and includes specific attributes which let the ZBrush groom sculpting brushes know that they are being used on a FiberMesh. Any 3D brush can be adjusted to edit fibers through settings in the Brush > FiberMesh sub-palette. However, if you do something that changes the topology — like slicing the fibers or adding subdivision levels – ZBrush converts the FiberMesh into a standard polymesh. From that point forward, the sculpting brushes will behave exactly like they would for any normal mesh object.

Explore the pages below to learn more about FiberMesh: