zBrush - export polypaint to vertex color
greentooth
Hey guys, I have a problem and I can't seem to find the documentation I need.
I have a very high res mesh, with both texture data and vertex colour data. I need to take this mesh through zbrush, but I can't seem to do this without loosing the vertex colour data. I know I can make a new polypaint from the texture, and iirc polypaint is basically vertex colour; So how do I export this vertex colour from my model?
I have a very high res mesh, with both texture data and vertex colour data. I need to take this mesh through zbrush, but I can't seem to do this without loosing the vertex colour data. I know I can make a new polypaint from the texture, and iirc polypaint is basically vertex colour; So how do I export this vertex colour from my model?
Replies
Is that what you're asking?
Thanks!
Some apps/verssions of the obj importer are a bit annoying with properly importing various data from objs, it can be quite annoying.
They basically shoved the Polypaint vertex colour information into the OBJ file as comments so "standard" OBJ importers won't even read it.
There are only a couple of apps which updated their OBJ importer to support this (XNormal is one), I guess if someone was feeling particularly adventurous with scripting/coding then they could do the same with other apps.
As Bal said the best way to get this colour info into another program (without modifying the import tools to support Pixologic's hacky implementation!) is by baking it out using XNormal and then applying the result back to the original object. Obviously this means your polypainted object will need UVs - although the quick GUVTiles or something like that might be passable if your object isn't already mapped.
Then export your high mesh and texture (the texture will be flipped in the vertical direction. You can fix that in ZBrush export options or in the texture menu or in Phoshop). Just make sure NOT to decimate your highres as that tends to hose the Polypaint.
One thing I was wondering of is using GoZ to get the polypaint info. It probably won't work but it's something to try.
Just to be clear, you're not asking how to load polypaint from zbrush into other programs, you're asking how to get vertex color from another program into zbrush to preserve it?
If that's the case, what are the vertex colors going to be used for? Do they need to be loaded into zbrush to drive the material/color, or are you looking to make some change to the mesh in zbrush and get the result back out (in which case you don't need to load them into zbrush, you just need the resulting zbrush export to play happy with information from the old mesh in a standard modeling program)?
I came across this problem again recently, and while googling it, I hit my own thread! Luckily I have a workaround/solution, so I thought I'd post it.
Once again, this is for a situation where you want to export polypaint information from zBrush as colour per vertex, and you need to read this colour per vertex in another program. Using Texture maps isn't an option. For clarification, an example situation like this is if you had high density 3d scan geometry with colour data, that you needed to merge together.
The simple workaround is to export from zBrush as an OBJ, then load it into meshlab. Meshlab can read the vertex colours in the obj and will be able to export PLY, which is more commonly used for meshes vertex colour.
That's about it! Hopefully whatever you are importing to can real .ply files. (for the record, xNormal does great with them!)
Sorry for the necro bump everyone.
Also sorry to bump the thread after so long, but this appears to be the top result when searching for how to transfer Polypaint out of Zbrush as vertex colors.
The method Fearian suggests works fine as of March 2016 (Zbrush 4R7).
I have tested this by:
-Decimating a mesh down to 5 million polys ("use and keep polypaint")
-Exporting the resulting mesh as OBJ
-Importing the OBJ into Meshlab
-Export out of Meshlab as PLY
-Import into 3ds max using the "Guruware PLY importer" (Free 3rd party plugin for 3ds Max) with scale set to 1.
Results in a perfect transfer of polypaint as vertex colors.
If a new or quicker technique has been developed i'd be most interested to hear about it.
Thanks again Fearian!
i had no trouble locating a maxscript via google that reads zbrush's polypaint and imports the OBJ without further ado. disclaimer: i had to alter it so it would not create a menu item all by itself and i have not tested how it would handle truly complex geometry, i tend to only require vertex colors on medium density meshes or lower. i recall i found the link to it somewhere on vimeo.
unaltered file attached.
ThomasP - Nice work! I will warn others that for heavy scan meshes (my original issue) Max doesn't handle things well.
http://polycount.com/discussion/196704/cw-flash-barry-allen-sculpt#latest
BUT as you can see the error below , it did not pick the vertex color i assigned to high poly meshes , i researched and found out that when exporting it to fbx i have to make sure that all vertex have color , like even the white color has to be painted . so i checked it again and i am pretty sure there is no vertex without color , but still am not getting any color . plus my third udim which is of face and half mask is black . like this