ZBRUSH - How to prevent the texture from being distorted when Subdividing?

Klaus Hustle

I'm at it again with my wooden planks: 

I made a basic rectangle in max, some supporting edges, goz'd it into zbrush, subdivided it til i got something around 3 million polys (i smoothed in one step to get the edges a bit rounded).

I go back to my lowest subD-level in zbrush and goz back to 3dsmax to unwrap the model, and put it back in zbrush.

So what i've got now is a rectangle with 9 subdivision levels, uv'ed. Now i'm painting my texture in Photoshop and load it into Zbrush, and as i raise the Subdivision level i get more and more distortion.



I get that this is happening because the subdividing changes the topology, but isn't there anything to prevent this, or at least make it better a bit? I also tried different topology for my low-res model instead of some supporting edges, but it didn't help so far..

I could use spotlight to texture the highpoly and won't get any distortion, but the benefit of having the texture is that it's stays sharp and high-res and it's pretty easy to handle in combination with photoshop.. but if i'm not able to fix this problem i'm going to try spotlight with higher resolutions to get better results..

kanga

If you want zero distortion then you have to apply the texture at the highers subD in ZB. That would be your end result. Typically I would texture the plank in ZB, mask by color (isolate the darkest parts) and deflate them. That gives me visual depth. Delete the lower subs and copy the tool, then decimate the copy. Export the copy to Max and play with the export options in ZB till I get the correct size in Max. Retopo in Max using the decimated plank as a base template. Uv the retopoed version in Max then export the uved shell to ZB due to the better fbx exporter. Export the high rez version and uved low rez as fbx (with proper naming conventions), import them into substance painter, bake and BAM. Then up the textures with all the tools and additional maps in Painter.

Klaus Hustle

Don't i run into the same problem when touching the topo of the decimated version in 3dsmax for the UV's? Or maybe i'm making some thinking error, there is only one way, try!

I had some troubles with import/export FBX files, 3dsmax always butchers the orientation and size of my object. But it works with GOZ, so nvm..

€: there is only 2 ways i'm aware of how to texture a high-poly in zbrush, spotlight and projection-master.. because i've got new UV's i cannot apply a texture from the slot..

But those blurr out my texture to a degree and it doesn't look at crisp, any idea to get better results?

Klaus Hustle

Well, the accuracy is craaaaazy (obviously because it's projected 1:1 :P )

- i did the highpoly with dynamesh
- textured it with spotlight
- decimated to lowpoly
- Retopo & UV in Max
- loaded the new lowpoly in zbrush and used ProjectAll to get the details and polypaint step by step per SubD on my object

Sadly as mentioned, the texture got verry blurred, i don't know if it's spotlights fault, maybe my polycount isn't high enough, but my document size is 8k and my highpoly dynamesh had around 7k polys... that is as high as i can get with my machine

Klaus Hustle

This is my  HighPoly Dynamesh with Polypaint on it, projected via Spotlight. I masked the color by Intensity and Offset XYZ for Mesh-Details



I loaded the UV Map in Photoshop and reapplied my wood-texture, made a height-map, and loaded the maps in zbrush, looking great! 



  

Your suggestion to start with a highpoly was golden, i should have thought of that, thank you!