Problem with UV mapping a high-poly for painting

Ruflse

Hi! I'm still pretty green and having some trouble trying to find a workflow I'm comfortable with, so I don't really get the hang of UV mapping some surfaces from Zbrush to 3ds Max.

When I try to use UV Master for a high poly in Zbrush it usually crashes or makes something impossible to work with, so I made a lowpoly and imported it into 3ds Max, but I don't know how to make a decent UV map for a melted surface like this. For the UV islands I applied the normal mapping option and made two faces, and that "works" for the body of the candle and the wick, but for the spark and the chunks it's just a big mess with separated parts. I've tried applying pelt-edge selections to the body, but the seams are a disaster anyways.

My idea is making the UV map in 3ds Max using the low-poly, then import it into Zbrush to make a normal and a displacement map with the high-poly and then paint in Substance Painter or Photoshop. How could I do that? Or what would be a better way of making a UV Map for a high-poly in Zbrush for painting?



Also, I how could I toughen small details on the mesh like these? I smoothed and lowered the subdivisions for the body, which doesn't look so good.



Any help is much appreciated!

Eric Chadwick

Since you have Substance Painter, I would suggest baking the model in there. Export a OBJ of the zbrush sculpt as your highpoly.

To make your lowpoly you could try Zremesher or you could model it in 3ds max, many ways to do this.

After baking the highpoly info down onto the lowpoly, then you do all your painting on the low. The high does not need UVs.

If this is meant for use in a game, the spark is best done as an effect, not as a model.

Ruflse

Eric Chadwick said:

Since you have Substance Painter, I would suggest baking the model in there. Export a OBJ of the zbrush sculpt as your highpoly.

To make your lowpoly you could try Zremesher or you could model it in 3ds max, many ways to do this.

After baking the highpoly info down onto the lowpoly, then you do all your painting on the low. The high does not need UVs.

If this is meant for use in a game, the spark is best done as an effect, not as a model.

But would't I need a UV Map for baking the maps from the high-poly and painting on the low-poly? I haven't used SP much yet, so I'm probably wrong.

Anyways, after making a shitty UV map in Maya, I ended generating an automatic UV map merging all the subtools in Zbrush with the same subdivisions to preserve them and using UV Master with the lowpoly so it didn't crash, then I set the subdivisions to the highest again and created a texture and a normal map on which I painted using Photoshop. It's not the best way, but it worked.

I was just messing with UV mapping and textures, so the spark is not a problem, but thanks for the advise.

Behold, the "messiest" candle in planet Earth!

Eric Chadwick

For baking, you only need a UV on the lowpoly.

If you did any polypainting in Zbrush, that's actually stored in Zbrush as vertex colors, so it doesn't need UVs at all. You can bake this to your lowpoly UVs using a tool like Xnormal, which can understand vertex color saved from Zbrush in a OBJ file.

Ruflse

Eric Chadwick said:

For baking, you only need a UV on the lowpoly.

If you did any polypainting in Zbrush, that's actually stored in Zbrush as vertex colors, so it doesn't need UVs at all. You can bake this to your lowpoly UVs using a tool like Xnormal, which can understand vertex color saved from Zbrush in a OBJ file.

Oh, I didn't know that.
That will surely come in handy in the future, thanks!

Eric Chadwick

Also this might help
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking