Zbrush poly painting sub tools workflow
hey all,
Let me apologize first off as its late and I've been trying to wrap my head around this all night and figured it's time to come tk the forums.
I'm trying to establish a new workflow with poly painting. My goal is to make a base mesh bring it into zbrush for some sculpting and poly painting. Then make a low and sometimes needed mid poly mesh in maya or topogun,unwrap, then bake a color map from the high Rez to the mid/lo map in topogun.
Here's where I kind of go cross eyed. I've seen tutorials and read documentation that I should bring my sub tool to the lowest subdivision when I make my UVs for my high poly using GUVtiles (I know this is an ugly map but I only want the color data from it) . This all works great with a single sub tool and I get good results. But when I need something extracted, the extract gets locked at the subdivision it gets extracted at. I can't go to the lowest sub division to generate my maps and a higher subdivision map gives me horrible results and extracting at a lower subdivision doesn't really give me the shape I want. So I have multiple questions to how others use a workflow similar to this. Merging the sub tools and trying to make UVs from that doesn't help at all..... I'm most likely going at this all wrong. I've been banging my head off my desk the last couple of hours trying different things to make it work. Modeling everything I need to extract in maya doesn't seem like an efficient workflow so I'd really like to avoid that...
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the novel.
cheers,
Let me apologize first off as its late and I've been trying to wrap my head around this all night and figured it's time to come tk the forums.
I'm trying to establish a new workflow with poly painting. My goal is to make a base mesh bring it into zbrush for some sculpting and poly painting. Then make a low and sometimes needed mid poly mesh in maya or topogun,unwrap, then bake a color map from the high Rez to the mid/lo map in topogun.
Here's where I kind of go cross eyed. I've seen tutorials and read documentation that I should bring my sub tool to the lowest subdivision when I make my UVs for my high poly using GUVtiles (I know this is an ugly map but I only want the color data from it) . This all works great with a single sub tool and I get good results. But when I need something extracted, the extract gets locked at the subdivision it gets extracted at. I can't go to the lowest sub division to generate my maps and a higher subdivision map gives me horrible results and extracting at a lower subdivision doesn't really give me the shape I want. So I have multiple questions to how others use a workflow similar to this. Merging the sub tools and trying to make UVs from that doesn't help at all..... I'm most likely going at this all wrong. I've been banging my head off my desk the last couple of hours trying different things to make it work. Modeling everything I need to extract in maya doesn't seem like an efficient workflow so I'd really like to avoid that...
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the novel.
cheers,
Replies
Are you talking about you have to freeze subdivisions to do an insert mesh?
If so after you do the Insert you can then go back and unfreeze the subdivisions so you can continue to increase or reduce as you see fit.
Also can look into Dynamesh as a means of producing the mesh you want and then zremesh or manual retopo to produce your lowest subdivision to create maps from and then project the details back into each new higher subdivision
Those tutorials are old. Programs like xnormal gained the ability to import and bake polypaint data on their own, so your highpoly sculpt doesn't even need UVs. It's a lot less to worry about and should free your workflow up quite a bit.
Appreciate the speedy response, excited to try it this way. I'll post in here with my results.
(Fingers crossed)
Cheers,