Zbrush scale/offset issues during export and decimation

Nosslak

Hey, I'm detailing a rifle in ZBrush and am having some major problems. I'd like to decimate it and export it so that I can take it into Blender and explode it so that I can make a clean bake from it. However I'm hitting some major problems when I try to decimate or export it where it just messes up the offsets of a lot of the subtools.

Here's what my model looks like before I do anything:


And here's an example of the problem:


For the example here it's just a single subtool, so it doesn't look too bad. But when I tried it last night with all the subtools maybe 10 or 15 of the subtools got all messed up with different scales and offsets.

I tried searching for a solution but couldn't really find any solution either when searching here, ZbrushCentral or on Google, however I'm not completely sure what causes the problem so I might just have missed it.
I re-imported a few of the models as there were a few problems so at first I thought it was just those that would act up, but upon further examination I saw that many of those works as expected. For a few of the models I used the slice brush as there weren't even geometry but that doesn't seem to be the problem either as a few of those work well. So I don't know what's causing the problem here.
I'm not sure what the ScaleOffset function under SubtoolMaster does, but it sounded like what I needed to I tried running that as well, but it didn't really help the problem. When I tried decimating the same subtool as above after running ScaleOffset but the only difference was that the barrel got scaled up bigger and was offset further on the other side.

I'm not sure where to go from here as I feel like I've tried pretty much everything I can come up with. I would really appreciate some help on where to go from here.

Nosslak

I accidentally posted this in the wrong section could someone please move this to Technical Talk?

SuperFranky

If you have problems on import, try using Subtool Master - Multiappend function instead, sometimes it works better than the usual import button.

Nosslak

SuperFranky wrote: »

If you have problems on import, try using Subtool Master - Multiappend function instead, sometimes it works better than the usual import button.

Thanks, I am often having problems with importing models so I'll try this next time I need to re-import something. So thanks a lot for the tip. However the problem that I am having is that the scale and/or location of some of my subtools gets messed up when I try to export or decimate my model (not during import this time) and I don't know what to do about it.

nyx702

Down at the bottom of your Tool menu there is an Import/Export sub menu. Are those numbers crazy high/low? Decimation master actually imports and exports your mesh I believe so it's probably something to do with your export/import settings.

It appears you imported it off center maybe? Something you can try is appending all your subtools to one of the zbrush primitives. This sets their scale to the primitives. I have a script for this in my plugin (in my signature) because I run into this problem alot with other peoples files. Or possibly merge visible decimate that and then split the parts again? Just throwing out ideas for you to test.

Nosslak

nyx702 wrote: »

Down at the bottom of your Tool menu there is an Import/Export sub menu. Are those numbers crazy high/low? Decimation master actually imports and exports your mesh I believe so it's probably something to do with your export/import settings.

I looked into changing the export settings a little bit yesterday, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. I'll look into the import/export settings a bit more again tonight, just to be sure I haven't looked over anything.

nyx702 wrote: »

It appears you imported it off center maybe? Something you can try is appending all your subtools to one of the zbrush primitives. This sets their scale to the primitives. I have a script for this in my plugin (in my signature) because I run into this problem alot with other peoples files. Or possibly merge visible decimate that and then split the parts again? Just throwing out ideas for you to test.

Yeah, I imported it off center as that is how I modeled it. It's not really something I've thought about, but it's kind of a bad habit so I'll try to stop doing that.
I tried using your script and it seems to have helped with the export problems, but the decimation still doesn't work because of the same problem as before. It seems like a really useful script that will come in handy for sure so thanks for sharing it!
What I usually do is indeed to just merge it all and decimate that single subtool, as that usually sidesteps all of ZBrushes tomfoolery. However the model is currently clocking in at about 17 million polygons (I know it's a bit overkill) so Zbrush runs out of memory and crashes when I try to do that in this case.

Thanks a lot for the help, Nick!

Shanana

If you're still having this problem with 4r8, I just fixed it by baking the layers. Reexporting/importing didn't help, neither did putting export values back to scale 1. You'd think by Zbrush would've fixed it's export/scale quirks right?