Due to lack of planning and time restrictions, I did not unwrap my UV's before moving my base character mesh into Zbrush for high poly sculpting. I am needing to project my detail from the high poly sculpt onto the low poly mesh via normal maps.
Not having my UV's unwrapped is holding me up from doing so. I am trying to us UV Master to unwrap my UV's. After I use UV Master my UV islands are separated onto individual UV spaces. I have been reading that you can do the following to combine the UV islands onto a single UV quadrant.
Is this process correct to unwrap the UVs to a single UV space?
- Use Transpose Master to combine all of your meshes
- Unwrap the combined mesh
- Use Groups Split to spilt the TM mesh into subtools
- Use UV Master to Copy/Paste the UVs to the original subtools
Thank you all!
Replies
1. Merge all subtools into one ( merge visible button is below of subtool layers)
2. Pick the new tool (the polygroups should have been preserved)
3. Go to UV master
4. click Work on Clone
5. While in clone tool, click "polygroups" button of UV master
6. Click Unwrap for default unwrap or do control painting if you want to custom markup the seams (you'll have to click unwrap when done with control painting)
7. Flatten to double check.
8. Unflatten then click copy uvs.
9. Go back to your original merged tool, not the clone, paste UV in UV master. It should copy over.
10. If you want to break up your model into subtools again, use group split
It looks like a lot of steps but you should be done in a couple of minutes if you just want a quick unwrap and do no control painting.
Fantastic, thank you very much for the walk through! Really appreciate it!
With this, how do I move the new UV set back to my mesh with multiple Sub-D levels?
I merged the high level sub-tools, and when I try to Unwrap the high res merged mesh I get an error listed below:
"Not enough memory to complete this unwrap. Split your model into different SubTools in order to reduce the poly count."
So what do you think?
If you still can't UV it because you have too many verts, then you're lowest subdivision levels contain too much geometry and should be retopologized first.
Gotcha, thank you for the advise. I'll go through my Subtools and see how my sub-d's look measure against each other. Appreciate the feedback.
i took my hp into 3d coat and got a lp off it i also gave the lp uvs im now in xnormals trying to get an id map etc but the uvs that come out are from the highpoly have i missed a step?
What I do is merge my character subtools in zbrush.
Check colorize is on and export the merged model at top resolution to a hard disk.
I have my lowpoly in 3dsmax that I built over a decimated version of the zbrush hipoly. The lowpoly and hipoly are in sync because before starting the project I set up the export settings in zbrush and 3dsmax (just using a cube in max) with GoZ.
I use the decimated version of the character in Max as a reference for a projection cage over the retopoed lowpoly and export the lowpoly using the xnormal lowpoly export option in Max with projection cage checked (you get that when you install xnormal).
I point xnormal to the exported zbrush hipoly model (an .obj) and the Max exported lowpoly (with uvs) and never have a problem.
I have xnormal open and I cant see where it can go wrong. There dont seem to be options that would cause the use of wrong uv sets as there is only a lowpoly and a hipoly button so that is why the models might be in the wrong place.