Workflow for ZBrush to Painter (for an Character Artist)

goekbenjamin

As a beginner you are many many times confronted with the sentence: "To use this 3D "model/character.." us have to lower the polycount so that can be used for a gameengine.

One problem is that how to find a good or at least acceptable workflow for ZBrush?
Are there so many many different workflows that non of them are mentioned?

So as an beginner (please have mercy ) here is a workflow i think is good, or at least the only one i can think of becuse of the lack of missing experience:

ZBrush:
1. sculpt your model, so at the end there is a high poly mesh
2. create a lowpoly with ZRemesher, or Decimation Master (i am not sure) but i guess
Decimation Master to lower the count, than ZRemesher to get a better topology?
3. with "UV Master" unwrap the lowpoly, than "Copy UVs"
4. select the highpoly and with "UV Master" select "Paste UVs"
5. save both polys for later usage in Substance Painter

Substance Painter:
1. setup new document with lowpoly as basemesh
2. inside of texturesList settings insert the highpolymesh than bake the textures (good for details in highmaps etc?)
3. paint on it, etc etc...

is this somehow a good workflow? or am i on a completly wrong road here

cryrid

I wouldn't use  Decimation Master. Your best bet, especially for characters, is to manually retopologize the mesh. 

You can not copy and paste UVs between the two models either since they have a completely different vertex order and vertex count. Your highpoly model shouldn't need any UVs at all, so skip that step completely. 

Alex_J

Here's an alternative:

Begin with the Zbrush standard base mesh. Use the move brush to reshape it to fit your needs, and save out a copy. If you want to reduce the initial polygons, you can "reconstruct subdivisions." If you need some custom topology, you can edit it with zModeler. But for a normal human, the zbrush base models are excellent.

Subdivide the base mesh as needed for sculpting. If you need clothes or props, you can create them by extracting from the base mesh. Subdivide them as necessary. 

At the end of your sculpting, set all subtools to low and export, then set all to high and export. You shouldn't need to retopo the low. If you hav e made clothes and props, you will probably need to retopo these. You can use the Zbrush tools, but I find other 3d apps better for this. For very simple clothing, zRemesher may get you liike 70% there, but for sure you'll want to make some manual editing. 

If you want to do the UV's inside Zbrush as well, you can do them on the low and export. The standard base mesh already has a UV layout, but if you've changed the mesh significantly or added new mesh parts like clothing and props, you'll obviously need to redo a lot of the UV's, reorganize, etc. Personally, I wouldn't recommend doing all of this in Zbrush, however it is certainly possible.


I've found this workflow to be simpler and more manageable than starting with the high poly sculpting first and working backwards. Both styles have their benefits and drawbacks, but for a beginner getting into a complex process, I tend to like a more simple approach.

goekbenjamin

@cryrid
Is "Decimation Master" not really used in the industry? If so, why? Because you can't controll the flow?  I know one person can't answer such a question alone, but i have to start somewhere

that thing with the uvs... on this video "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki0jBmjrqc4" at "00:40" he says "Work on clone and go all down to the lowest subdevision", and than after unwrap at "04:43" he says ""copy uvs from lowpoly, than select the highpoly and paste the uvs"
i have to admit i have no idea why he does this, i thought this is a common way to do this kind of things

@BIGTIMEMASTER
So your way is "lowpoly to not-so-lowpoly"? 
I thought there will be much better results in Substance Painter (regarding the small details) when using the low poly as base mesh and the highpoly for baking out?

Thanks alot so far guys, i'm curious what others have to say too!
Do some of you also have MarvelousDesigner in their workflow?

cryrid

Decimation Master is useful if you have a sculpt with a few hundred million vertices and want to send it into another program to bake the maps or print off. It preserves all the surface detail that those things require but it does so at the expense of caring what the resulting topology looks like. That's fine for the sculpt, but the lowpoly model is a different story. Topology is super important there for optimization and deformation (which is especially important for characters). 

As for the video you linked, Michael Pavlovich is copying and pasting the UVs because he is working on a clone. This means the vertex order and count are the exact same between the model he is copying from and the model he is pasting to. This wouldn't be the case in the steps you listed as retopologizing the model creates a huge discrepancy between the two models at the base level. 

If you looked under the hood of the program, it's basically saying "vertex #23 has this UV coordinate value", "vertex #24 has that UV coordinate value", and so on. But if the models are different because you retopologized one, then those vertices are going to be in different locations on the models. Vertex #23 might be in the nose for the lowpoly model, and a toe for the highpoly. If you try to copy and paste the UVs it doesn't know this, it's only looking at which number has what coordinate. 

goekbenjamin

cryrid said:

Decimation Master is useful if you have a sculpt with a few hundred million vertices and want to send it into another program to bake the maps or print off. It preserves all the surface detail that those things require but it does so at the expense of caring what the resulting topology looks like. That's fine for the sculpt, but the lowpoly model is a different story. Topology is super important there for optimization and deformation (which is especially important for characters). 

As for the video you linked, Michael Pavlovich is copying and pasting the UVs because he is working on a clone. This means the vertex order and count are the exact same between the model he is copying from and the model he is pasting to. This wouldn't be the case in the steps you listed as retopologizing the model creates a huge discrepancy between the two models at the base level. 

If you looked under the hood of the program, it's basically saying "vertex #23 has this UV coordinate value", "vertex #24 has that UV coordinate value", and so on. But if the models are different because you retopologized one, then those vertices are going to be in different locations on the models. Vertex #23 might be in the nose for the lowpoly model, and a toe for the highpoly. If you try to copy and paste the UVs it doesn't know this, it's only looking at which number has what coordinate. 

ah ok i see, hmm but what is the thing with "work on a clone" by UV-Master? Is it that you can go on a lower subdivision on the clone, create the uv copy it, than paste it on the original with highest subdivision? If so, than it would make totally sense

cryrid

Yes, the clone option just makes a duplicate version of the sculpt without any subdivision levels or polypaint data. This is so that you can paint Control Lines onto the clone without destroying any polypaint data that might exist on the sculpt. It also avoids unnecessary reprojection of details when the plugin manipulates internal files, such as when using the Flatten or Unflatten utilities.