[ZBrush to Substance Painter] Workflow question

fai

Hey,

so I'm currently working on a character sculpt in ZBrush and I'm coming to the stage where I want to transition to Substance Painter to texture it. My plan is to polypaint the hiRes Character in Zbrush with Polypaint and add details and shaders in Substance since I won't do any manual retopology. Now at this point, I'm completely overwhelmed with what to do and all the tutorials available which I have watched. I'm pretty much a bloody begginer.
What would be my next steps? Which maps do I have to create where (would be awesome if it's possible in ZBrush) and which maps are needed for Substance Painter?
How do I differentiate between different parts of the model with different materials if they are not on separate subtools?

Sorry for all the questions, it's just such a huge load of information and I don't know where to start.. Does someone have a simple breakdown of the steps for me or anything like that, hope that's not too much asked for.

Thanks a bunch guys!

Burpee

Hey mate,

You need 2 mesh to start texturing in Substance, your low poly and your high poly. 
You low poly must have UV. The topology can be crappy but you need proper UV.

You import your low poly in painter and then in the Baking Section you just have to plug your high poly and bake all your map. You don't really have to export map from zBrush.

But if you want to export your polypaint, you just have to export your color map ( you can because you have UV ) and once you're in painter just create a new material and put your texture in the BaseColor, ( and change the tiling of the UV from 3 to 1 ) 

If you want to have for exemple metal and skin on the same piece ( for exemple on the face ), the best whould be to have different subtool, but still you can manage by having different UV shell. Or you can paint by hand but it's a pain ! 

good luck !

wilson66

Depends on what you mean by "won't do any manual retopology". Will you create an automatic one in ZBrush then? You should bake the vertex color to your lowres mesh in ZBrush and import that into Painter. Painting vertex colors is not possible there (in case you were planning to import your highres mesh from ZBrush directly into Painter, it kind of sounds like it).

You should bake all map types that are available for baking in Painter (normals, world space normals, AO, curvature, position and thickness). If you don't, materials/ masks will not work correctly, they rely on the baked maps. ID is only needed if you want to separate materials with masking using a colored ID map.

I never import geometry saved from ZBrush directly into Painter. I always import into Modo first, create the materials (material names will be the names of the TextureSets in Painter), and name the sub-objects correctly (with _low and _high suffix, else name matching in Painter won't work).

You sould definitely watch tutorials on youtube and step by step recreate the stuff the guys are doing. If you don't, you will run into problems very quickly.

fai

Thanks so much guys, the UV scale was bugging me
Definately understood the concept behind it more now! Both of your answers helped me alot really cheers