Baking - workflow question

Elod.H

Hello,

I`m having a bit of confusion on how to plan my workflow.

There are two main things I want to achieve:

1: Paint my color base with Polypaint in ZBRush. Bake this eventually.

2: Use 3DSMax's "Hit Only matching Material ID" function to avoid baking issues with close geometry. I'm aware that XNormal does not support Material ID's at the moment.

Now, this leaves me to bake in 3DSMax, but my problem is that I don't really know how to keep my polypaint information and export that into Max when a model is like around 10 million polys. If I decimate I loose the Polypaint information, obviously.

Right now, my plan is to bake the color map with XNormal. The AO + normal map in 3DSMax.

Is there a better solution to this then having to use different programs for different map baking?

Thank you!

EarthQuake

Can you export your polypaint colors onto the zbrush auto uv tiles thing? Then apply that map to the highpoly in max and bake a diffuse map in addition to the normals.

Elod.H

Thanks for the reply, EarthQuake!
Would I be able to apply that map to a decimated version of my original high poly? I need to decimate it if I want to use it in Max.

EarthQuake

Probably not? I'm not really a zbrush guy so I don't know, I assume decimate will not retain uvs but I'm not sure.

Wesley

When you use the decimation master there are options for retaining polypaint. So you can set-up your UVs, polypaint, decimate, then copy your polypaint to UVs, export everything into Max and then bake.

http://www.pixologic.es/downloads/files/pluginz4r3/Decimation_Master_Documentation.pdf

I can't quite remember how the UVs are affected while decimating. I do remember having a polypaint I wanted to use as a mask and having no UVs, I think I imported the UVs or created UVs and managed to transfer that polypaint without it messing up.

disanski

You don't need the highest subd from zbrush to bake the polypaint in 3ds max. You are not baking normal map. I usually do this:
- export level 3 or 4 with GUV tiles,
- export the polypaint from zbrush as a texture
- import the mesh in max
- apply the polypaint and bake from it.

Never had a problem so far.