ZBrush 3.5 Polypaint Help

Tom Ellis

Hey everyone.

After seeing the Naughty Dog vid on their Uncharted character workflow, it's inspired me to have a go at texture painting within a sculpting app. Up until now I've always textured in Photoshop.

I was just wondering if it's possible to Polypaint a sculpt I've done in ZBrush which originally started as a ZSphere base, then bake it to a low poly I created outside of ZBrush.

If anyone could be kind enough to go through the steps to do this it would be much appreciated. I've done some Googling but can't find much info about how to activate a Polypaint in 3.5.

As I said, the sculpt was created from a ZSphere base, and ultimately I'd like to bake the diffuse to a low poly I created in Topogun if it's possible.

Many thanks

disanski

Sure it is possible. I do it like that-

1- paint on your high poly mesh
2- give it GUV Tiles
3- export the texture
4- export the high poly mesh - (middle resolution- whatever your computer can handle)
5- import the mesh in max ,apply the texture on it
6- bake it using the bake to texture as a diffuse.

I think this is about it. I hope this is helpful.

Tom Ellis

Many thanks Disanksi,

That's good to know it's possible.

I'm having trouble actually painting my sculpt though, like how do I actually paint? I just keep sculpting and my whole model changes colour when I change the colour picker.

I know there's some steps you gotta take to start a polypaint, I just don't know what they are?!

disanski

I am pretty new at this so there might be a better workflow.
I usually choose the gray material and go to color- fill object or if you have few of them you can use subtool master amd gove fill on all of your subtools.
Once you fill your objects they will remain in the color you filled them in.
Then choose your brush and turn off Zadd and Zsub pick the color you want to start painting with and start painting
and have fun. It is pretty fun actually if you have not done it this way

Tom Ellis

Aha nice one, thanks a lot!

Am I right in thinking you can only paint diffuse currently? You can't paint spec in ZBrush right?

I know Mudbox can but if ZBrush could do it to that'd be cool.

disanski

I have not used it to bake specular but thinking about it now you could probably paint some values and then use it as a specular. The couple of times I have done it I start of my diffuse map and manipulate it from there.

oXYnary

creationtwentytwo wrote: »

Aha nice one, thanks a lot!

Am I right in thinking you can only paint diffuse currently? You can't paint spec in ZBrush right?

I know Mudbox can but if ZBrush could do it to that'd be cool.

I believe that's what the rgb"m" is for. To paint the material type.

Tom Ellis

Thanks for the replies, I will give it a go.

ralusek

ok so here is what you do. you don't need UV map or anything, simply polypaint your sculpt, append the low poly as a subtool and project the polypaint onto it. you just have to subdivide the low poly so it has enough polygons for the paint. to do this and maintain its shape, you just deselect "smooth" when subdividing, so all you're doing is readying it for the polypaint and nothing else. when it's about the same density as the high poly, just project the polypaint with project all or the zproject brush. at this point you can transfer to texture etc if your low poly is mapped

Tom Ellis

Thanks a lot Ralusek, a great help.

Just a quick question, once I have the low poly (which would technically be high poly after subdividing to use projection) how do I save out the texture, and will it apply straight onto the low poly with it's same UVs in Max even though the low poly had been subdivided when it was projected?

Apologies for the ignorance, this is all a very new process to me though as I've previously only used ZBrush to sculpt.

Thanks again.

divi

if you are using max, get gomax from the zbc boards. it can export the highpoly with the polypaint directly into max. if you have a weaker machine you should go with guv tiles and baking that though.

Tom Ellis

Thanks Divi,

I'll give that a go.

I still can't figure out how to do it the projection way though. I've got my low poly appended as a subtool, and projected the paint across successfully, then I just dunno how to get that texture out.

Tom Ellis

This is frustrating....

GoMax works fine but won't transfer my polypaint, and I think it's linked to the problem I had with trying the projection method too.

I only have the option to do 'new texture from polypaint' if I've got UV's on my sculpt. So I'm guessing, despite the fact I can see a polypaint, it's not actually a texture and therefore doesn't get sent to Max when I export.

I can't even explain it properly!

So here's my current steps, and hopefully you can point out where I'm going wrong.

I have a model with about 8 subtools (body, clothing, shoes etc etc) and each has between 5 and 7 SubD levels. So for simplicity when it comes to export, I merge all these to one mesh to do the polypaint. At this point, they have no UV's.



On the merged mesh, I click 'New Texture' then fill color. Paint some stuff.

If I send this now to Max, or if I append the low poly using Raluseks method and project the paint, it looks fine in ZBrush but then it gets into Max with no polypaint, just a blank ZBrush texture (Max is applying a texture when importing, just a plain color).

I can't create UV's on the merged tool since it's like 20 mil polys and despite me having an i7 920, GTX 275 and 12GB RAM, ZBrush has a stress and craps on my comp when I try to do Auto UV's on the sculpt. I would do this at a lower SubD level, but because the tool has been merged, it's only got the highest level remaining.

So I hope you kinda get my problem from that, but it's hard to explain any clearer than that!

Thanks for being patient

disanski

I am not sure what exactly you are doing, but could you recreate lower subdivision level?

Tom Ellis

I can if I keep my subtools separate, but then they would all need to be exported separately etc so for simplicty (and lazyness) I'm merging them as one but obviously this deletes the subdivision levels.

I guess I may have to do it as separates though.

oXYnary

Couldnt you just project the polypaint unto your lower sub-d* that has UV already?

*I mean from max. Your original, or the one before you combined all the subtools.

Tom Ellis

I tried that, using Ralusek's method, for whatever reason, I couldnt get the texture saved out. Sorry I can't really explain it, as I really have no idea what I'm doing.

Tom Ellis

Well now I feel stupid...

I was using the wrong OBJ of an old version of my low poly, one WITHOUT UV's... no wonder it wasn't bloody working.

It's working perfectly now thankyou, although ZBrush appears to flip the UV's of the texture for some reason. Which is easily fixed obviously, just not sure why it happens.

Thanks again to all who kept their patience!