Speed up workflow with Material IDs?

Finalhart

Hey guys, i've been looking for other alternatives to change my workflow to paint Material IDs in a HP object inside 3ds max. Right now it's taking me a lot of time to just select the surface and put for each polygon a different material ID, specially when i Turbosmooth my HP mesh i have to deal with selecting manually faces that are close to edges. It's taking me like from 30 mins to 1 hour for each HP mesh i don't know what is your approach for this? Any suggestions?

Eric Chadwick

Hard to tell what your issue is without a shot of your topology, and what you need to select.

Is this using material IDs for baking purposes?

Usually I select by element instead of by polygon, a lot faster.

Finalhart

Yea, the asset is just a simple wall and want to bake the normals and the IDs. Indeed selecting by element will be much faster but sadly i modeled the HP into 1 single mesh I guess that for next time will make it with separate parts.

Eric Chadwick

A screenshot is always a good idea. Helps others see what you're talking about, and helps them give you better feedback. I bet there are natural seams in your highpoly that would be natural places for splitting it.

Cr

Maybe you can import your highpoly in Zbrush and polypaint it, then export in OBJ and bake the vertex color info (in Xnormal for instance).
You can also easily split your highpoly (still in Zbrush) in many subtools while cliking auto group (in tool/polygroups) then click groups splits (in tool/subtool) to resplit your merged mesh in many elements.
But as Eric said, the easyer way is to let your highpoly in many elements.
Good luck with that Finalhart!

Finalhart

Sorry guys, i lost internet connection for over a month and couldn't post any pictures.

This is the wall i was talking about:


I don't have the problem anymore but for the rest of the assets i followed your advice and i was more careful about the process. Just splitting into separate elements inside of the model before making the HP version was really usefull for model it as separate parts when they were different elements so then putting on the material IDs were done in a matter of seconds