Asri,
One thing you can do in Zbrush that will make things easier is to turn symmetry on. you turn that on under transform. This will help cut your sculpting time in half and make it easier to keep everything the same and even.
Sharp lines in Zbrush come from masking and using the deformation tools. There are some excellent tutorials on
Shiny Life that will help you with the basics on deformation and not screwing up the active points, which can be easy to do. You can also look at the tutorials on the Zbrush site.
Please try to avoid smoothing in Zbrush unless you are really comfortable and know what you are doing. You can smooth a sculpt later in Photoshop using Gaussian blur set to 2.0 which is safer and will avoid you losing points.
Try the new exporter from Zbrush by 2K Suisei
SL Forums
Make sure that you are exporting from Zbrush as an object, then using the converter. Also save your tools along the way you can use those as a base along the way for other items. Also the object file is a better way to back up your work as it is "universal" and you can use it in programs.
Also remember you don't have to make things perfect. Once you get the shape smooth and recognizable in Zbrush, subdivide it up 4-6 times, check it out and see how it looks. When you bake your textures bake them on the higher points, about 1 million. I use
Material Baker by David Ikeda but I have modified it some. I paint on the model to get the lines, then export out the color to texture and export the PSD file, then I take it into PS and try to make the lines as clean as possible, then I bring it back into Zbrush, to see how the cleaned lines look on the model. A lot of tutorials I looked at people baked just the material then put it as an overlay in PS. I like to bake each color, it makes for more work but I think it has better results and looks higher quality.
I am working on a tutorial for some basics with shoes in Zbrush, including texture baking and lighting. I spent almost a whole week working 10 hours a day to get lighting to a point it was decent, but not perfect. I might just make my lighting setting available for download here on
SLU.
Also you have to remember that you already know 3D modeling, you have been doing it in
SL for 4 years, and you were one of the best. You made interesting shoes (you are from Detroit, how could you not
) while other people were making Lands End soccer mom shoes. So you have the talent, you understand how prims work, you understand the flaws of
SL. The only thing you have to do is think of sculpts as prims that give you more options and I think you will find it is a lot easier. You can't think of it as real world shoe parts, but advanced prims and I think that will make the transition easier.
If you have any other questions or something I said doesn't make sense let me know here not in
SL, my IMs are broke.