Mudbox to Max OBJ and Crash
polycounter lvl 17
I have a beautiful few high res models in Mudbox, I want to bring them over to max to start building the low res.
I exported from Max TO Mud as OBJ, now I am Importing from Mud to Max as OBJ (although these are much more dense). -Every- time I do the importer comes up, it parses the size of the Mesh, I import, it parses some more, and when it get to the end... Crash.
I am using Max and Mud 2010. Max SP1.
Any thoughts. Does this happen to anyone else?
I exported from Max TO Mud as OBJ, now I am Importing from Mud to Max as OBJ (although these are much more dense). -Every- time I do the importer comes up, it parses the size of the Mesh, I import, it parses some more, and when it get to the end... Crash.
I am using Max and Mud 2010. Max SP1.
Any thoughts. Does this happen to anyone else?
Replies
Have you considered using Meshlab to crunch down the high poly model into a manageable low poly for unwrapping? Great little free program.
http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
From here I get a great wood texture, and set up the subdivisions to about 6. I then, with the Knife tool, start paining real soft on the model. I get a great wood texture seen here: http://www.andrewchason.com/wordpress_andrew/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/WIP_060310_02.jpg
Yeah, the thing is REAL dense, but -great- looking. So, is there another way to do this? I am I just ignorant and inexperienced and don't know any better (which is alright, I can only learn by doing)?
Meshlab seems cool, but I am not sure about it's function at this junction. I don't need a low poly so much as to be able to bake between high and low. And if I crunch my high down, then... well, I will loose the detail I carved in in the first place, or am I wrong? :S
Thank you for your help, please, I don't mean to sound obstinate.
Doing this sort of thing in photoshop(and then converting to bump/normals/whatever) will be a much more flexible option, when you realize the scale of the grain is too fine, or you dont like the pattern, or for whatever reason you just want to change it. Doing this sort of detailing in mud means you gotta go back to mud, redo the work there, re-export, rebake, all of which is going to take an infinitely longer time than doing it in 2d.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't sculpt anything, on the contrary, you should rework the mesh and concentrate on the low frequency details, the larger forms, as right now you've got a very boring, excessively sharp object with some noisy texture overlays thrown on it. Its a classic case of getting all excited and throwing a bunch of layers of stuff on a sculpt without ever getting the base shape interesting.
Don't worry, you don't!
If I were you, I'd use xNormal to bake, rather than Max - saves worrying about reducing detail for the sake of memory management, and it's a great little program with plenty of documentation and a huge thread here about how to use it.
http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx
edit: I think I completely misunderstood your original post, and I didn't bother to check out the image. But definitely check out xNormal anyway. Sorry for being a spaz - it's very late. Or early....
Crazybump would be the route i would take, yeah. Be careful with this sort of thing however, woodgrain should be pretty subtle, you dont need to have detail in every pixel of your normal map.
You wouldn't necessarily need to use Meshlab to create your low poly - you could just delete the turbosmooth modifier and eliminate the unnecessary edge loops from your base mesh, unless you collapsed the modifier stack or can't be bothered tidying up the base mesh.
People say you should learn sculpting so you understand all levels of form, not just the high detail stuff, so treating mudbox the same as you would doing some overlays for bumpmaps isn't going to get you far, you need to consider the entire form, and that starts with the low level shapes, the mid level details, and then finally the high level stuff, which currently is the only thing you've got.
There are a lot of cool things you can do with an object like this, you could take the segments and add some slight warping and angled areas to create some interest, bend the metal part that surrounds it, create some unique damage on the wood, some nice large cracks. There are a lot of things you can do in between what you have now and completely destroying it.
Some of that stuff can be done before you even get to mud as well. Its important to watch those extra sharp corners too, as these sort of wheels would generally have more of a rounded edge.
I was gonna do a quick little mock up here but it looks like i haven't installed mud since the last OS install, oh well. Anyway i'll shut up now, sorry if this has been a bit of an off topic rant. =D