SubD from Maya to Zbrush

G3L

Hello all!

I've always run into this problem and luckily there's always different solutions to problems but I know that there has got to be an easier way to deal with this.

So here we have two simple boxes that I would like to sculpt on in Zbrush. As you can see, I've done the traditional SubD method and the way I would have to work around with this at times in order for the sculpting to be balanced in Zbrush is to cut these pieces up into even quads. Sometimes I end up removing the supporting edges I've made or just made a ton of cuts to compensate.


Would I import this into Zbrush, we already know what happens when I start to subdivide and sculpt. The quads close to the edge will be distributed unevenly and I'll get some weird artifacts because of the long quads it would produce.

I looked all over the internet and Polycount for a solution and the only thing I could find that came close, was an old thread that talked about creasing, which I've never really tried and maybe should.

Does anyone have solutions or different workarounds to be able to sculpt on these pieces of geo in Zbrush without having to cut into it a bagillion times or foregoing the creasing method? Thanks! o/

Internet Friend

Just DynaMesh it.

Creasing such a simple shape would just be a single press of the Crease button in ZBrush with crease tolerance set over 90, though.

musashidan

Creasing won't help as you'll still have rectangular quads on the sides. Simplest way is zremesher. Set a low target and use the new options in R7 to maintain the hard-surface silhouette.

G3L

Obviously this was a simple example but when you get into more complex hard surface shapes it can become a worse problem. I tried dyanmeshing but didn't try the crease options in ZBrush.

Also will give  zremesher a shot and see how that goes. Thanks for the replies!

JedTheKrampus

Use creases in Maya instead of support loops if you're going to take it into Zbrush to sculpt afterward. Use GoZ to take the crease data over to Zbrush or smooth the mesh a few times in Maya and reconstruct subdivs in Zbrush from the .obj. In Zbrush you'll want to subdivide without the creases after a certain point to get nice smoothly subdivided edges. Probably 2 iterations of the smoothing in Maya will be ideal to make a mesh that's good to sculpt on, depending on the density of the subd cage and the distance from the camera that the model is of course.

musashidan

G3L said:

Also will give  zremesher a shot and see how that goes. Thanks for the replies!

Make sure to turn on 'keep groups' and set the 'smoothgroups' to zero. If you have your polygroups set up so that they change wherever you want a hard edge,(similar to smoothing groups on low-poly models) then I think you'll be pleasantly surprised even on more complex meshes.

Although obviously it's still an auto-topo tool so won't be perfect for your needs. But it can easily be cleaned up a bit if needs be with the Zmodeler brush.

Using creasing will retain your hard edges depending on your crease level threshold, but is not ideal as you will still be left with rectangular edges on the sides(in your box example) which, as you know, will propogate up the sub-divs and result in uneven sculpting topology.