3DMax?Possible turn 3sided poly into 4 for Zbrush?

Zatoichi

Yah, I'm mostly a texture artist and have little 3D knowledge. I can't find, for the life of me, if its possible to turn a Max model that has 3 sided polygons into 4 sided polys to be imported into Zbrush?

Zatoichi

Oh, and one other thing... should I have the model UV unwrapped before importing into zbrush or just leave that up to zbrush?

All this is me trying to get something into zbrush so I can get on doing normal maps.

Thanks!

FAT_CAP

Hmmm - well you can just turn the object from EDIT MESH into EDIT POLY... this will clear up most of the tri/quad stuff unless you have manually split the quads. Otherwise you can add a MESHMOOTH modifier set to one iteration, and pick NURMS subdivision - that will make all the tris into quads but this might not be the option your looking for.

This NURMS subdivision solution isn't really the best way though as the resulting mesh becomes much more dense. Doing it by hand is the best way and will leave you with a cleaner, more efficient base mesh at the end of the day. Although if you are taking the model into ZBRUSH for some high-poly goodness then maybe that doesnt bother you so much and you can keep the triangulated model for the low-poly version?

ZBRUSH has an AUTO-UV option which will lay the UVs out for you... though they are not user-friendly at all. If you are going to be normal-mapping the object though, then the UVs on the high-poly dont really matter - just that the low-poly is UVd. I have had some issues when creating a bump map on a ZBRUSH-UVd model (using Projection Master) and importing this back into MAX for rendering - no idea why though.

Hope this helps

John Warner

i usualy just go through the model by hand and clean it up. i also make sure and sub-divide the model in max, because i find that zbrush's sub-d algorythm (how do you spell that damn word anyway) is a little strange.. i also find that zbrush is reaaally picky when it comes to your mesh. all sorts of little imperfections will cause problems.. i find that if you have a vertex with 3 edges running into it instead of 4, zbrush can sometimes turn that into a tiny un-smoothable spike if you're not careful..