A couple of Zbrush questions...

maze

Hi There,

I have a couple questions of ZB, one regarding polypaint, and the second one regarding Decimation master.

1) I did a bed some days ago in ZB as part of a scene I am building, it was also to practice polypainting for the first time. Although I sort of like the result in ZB (polypaint) everytime I try to do "new texture from polypaint" and exporting it.... it looks like crap! (meaning that when I open the texture in PS I get the texture with a lot of artifacts like square shapes with the texture color)

Someone in the ZB Central forum told me that this might be caused either for too low poly...or also for too high poly interpolation... :poly127:

So I am a bit confused now... the bed was 10 million polys, and I wanted to output a 1024 texture. So if anyone had a similar problem or maybe have a different way to approach this it'll be cool to know!





2) As for decimation master, let's say you have a 10 million Polygon subtool...you decimate until 3 million. Now let's say you have 10 subtools of the same size decimated. meaning around 30 million polys still left. Do you apply a second decimation? (lower values) or do you export tool by tool at 3 million (to bake in xnormal)? ... because ideally what I want is to use subtool master to combine all subtools in one .OBJ, but if it's that huge,
I am not sure if xnormal will crash or so. So again I will like to know your workflow for stuff like this ... thanks for your time!!!!

mathes

I'll start with the simplest question, did you import the bed with a custom UV map, or are you letting Zbrush do that for you?

maze

Hi Mathes,

I created block primitives in max, unwrap them all, and then import them to zbrush for further sculpting / texturing... so I am actually getting the texture display "corretly" within the UV coordinates, although I mentioned it look like crap...:shifty: I am sure I am doing something wrong, there should be simpler way to better calcul polycount in ZB in regards to polypaint resolution output...

maze

...mmm, anyone can give me a hand on this? :shifty:

vcool

Well since you are polypainting and most likely not planning to edit the texture later, why don't you use UVtiles? That type of unwrap unwraps each polygon, and since each polygon has a unique colour, it will be seamless.

maze

Hi vcool thanks for answering, mmm...I am sort of new to polypainting, I haven't use uvtiles yet, can you refer me to a link to learn more about it, I'll appreciate that, thanks again!

Emil Mujanovic

Moving this to Technical Talk.

Steve Schulze

The UV tiles is the array of squares you're referring to. I'm not much a fan of them. I'm inclined to think you're always better to have the option to work on your textures in photoshop if need be, although they are nice if you just can't be bothered going to the trouble of making a proper UV map.

If you unwrapped your individual pieces the UVs much have been replaced at some point. Fear not though as you can reimport them. Drop down to your lowest subdivision level of a subtool and simply re-import the UVed mesh in on top of it. You should retain your detail and texturing but you'll bnow be able to export the texture to something that looks a bit more readable.

cryrid

For polypaint, perhaps you could move them to auto uvs, and use xnormal or a similar app to transfer it to your custom uvs?
http://eat3d.com/zbrush-xnormal-pipeline

manuqc

Emil, looks like I put this under the wrong subject, thanks for moving it.

jackablade, thanks for answering, ok I see what you mean by "square tiles" now". I had actually added detail in ZB, export my subtool at it's lowest sub div, rearrange uvs. and reimport it, and was then that I got those bad results when applying new texture from polypaint. Anyway I think overall I get a better idea...still though is not clear if there is 100% control like photoshop. I'll probably be just better off with Ps in the future, and polypaint just to set up base colors.

cryrid, sounds interesting, thanks for the link I'll be sure to check that out, maybe with xnormal I'll get better results...and one reason more to love that program! haha...