Help with finishing my high poly sculpt in zbrush to tile.
polycounter lvl 6
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/135/uhohimatool.jpg/
The problem I am having is that I need to copy all the brick pieces on the right to the left so that when I bake to a plane in xnormal, the texture will tile as intended.
Is there a way to do this in zbrush? The basemesh will tile perfectly as I set it up on the grid in my 3D app. But I'm not sure if I can duplicate and move over those pieces in zbrush. Because even if i can there's no grid snapping in zbrush so it might not align perfectly when I bake which defeates the whole purpose.
As a workaround I tried to export those High poly pieces on the right back to my 3d App to move into the proper place to tile. But when I export and combine those pieces with the zbrush obj's in xNormal, I lose the polypaint of the reexported pieces from my 3d app.
Oh lord. : D
Any suggestions?
The problem I am having is that I need to copy all the brick pieces on the right to the left so that when I bake to a plane in xnormal, the texture will tile as intended.
Is there a way to do this in zbrush? The basemesh will tile perfectly as I set it up on the grid in my 3D app. But I'm not sure if I can duplicate and move over those pieces in zbrush. Because even if i can there's no grid snapping in zbrush so it might not align perfectly when I bake which defeates the whole purpose.
As a workaround I tried to export those High poly pieces on the right back to my 3d App to move into the proper place to tile. But when I export and combine those pieces with the zbrush obj's in xNormal, I lose the polypaint of the reexported pieces from my 3d app.
Oh lord. : D
Any suggestions?
Replies
But I need it perfect so I can bake in xNormal.
Tild won't cut it for this type of texture.
Great tutorial though.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/689/altmethod.jpg/
I can see his method working for random organic like textures but not bricks.
In the screenshot I was trying to place (and "tilde" over) the bottom part of my texture.
One thing I have tried, and resulted it workable solutions, is to duplicate the subtool and use the offset function in the deformation rollout. I'm not sure what reference zbrush uses for it's units because it certainly isn't what I used in maya, it doesn't retain the offset ie: if you offset a subtool 5 units, there isn't any way to know numerically how much it has been offset, and finally you can only move it 100 at a time.
I was messing with a quick set of bricks, and in maya I had to move the object 64 units so it would tile and that equated to 160 offset in zbrush.
So a workflow would be to:
Duplicate your tool (probably step down in subdivisions for this)
Offset the various copies so you have tiling on all edges.
Only Export the pieces that are used for projection, because your exported obj might end up being HUGE. So the pieces way past the edge that won't contibute, to normal, AO etc... can be hidden.
It would be cool if xNormal had a feature like this some sort of high poly instance array, where you could set the offset. I'm not sure how it would affect things performance-wise, but I would take that hit so i wouldn't have to do what I just described in zbrush.
Under your brush > curves settings turn 'wrap mode' to 1. And then, you just have to be really careful about only doing things in the Y direction (or whatever direction is up in zbrush, I forget.) because you definitely don't want to mess up the shape of the edges on your square or it won't tile properly when you bake it.
I haven't figured out a way to use the move tool with specific units, and eyeballing it won't really work for tiling textures.
I have had moderate success using the offset option in deformations but it has it's own weird quirks as it can only offset 100 units at a time, and it has a weird convention for the value of those units. In my test 64units in maya = 160 units in zbrush.
How does that solve the loss of polypaint data?
Since its bricks though, I still think it would be easier to use the z-document approach.
The problem that I have found with this is that value you enter into the offset dialog, is not any sort of absolute unit but relative to the size of the object. Specifically the largest axis of the bounding box so if I have a box that is 10*8*4 100 offset equals half of the largest unit or 5 units, but when you throw in other units it becomes tricky because a box that is 12*8*4, 100 offset=6 units, but if you want to move 4 units it's 66.6 and this may lead to inaccuracies.
So it's all well and good if I bring in a set of bricks that I know the dimensions of, but it can be a pain in the ass when you have a set of objects which aren't as precise.
I wonder if using GOZ to manipulate duplicated subtools maybe a feasible work around.
Just don't be tempted to delete the extra pieces it caused a bunch of problems for me, better to do that in zbrush once you have instanced all your pieces for tiling.
How did GOZ help?
Cyrid: By z-document approach, you mean using the "tilde" method?
I set my doc size. And I split my main 3 subtools with Groups Split. So now each brick piece is it's own subtool.
However when I draw a subtool on the screen for some reason I can't move it after. Also every once in a while the "whole" original wall piece get's drawn on screen...like it's still there in each subtool.
It's totally whacked, and appears bugged.
I'm decimating the original mesh. Creating a low poly and baking. That way I'll keep my polypaint. Because I'll bake the original High mesh.
Tileable mesh FTW. Tileable texture for a Plane , lose.
I used it to translate the duplicated subtools in maya precisely. You do have to do them one by one unless I'm missing something, but it is a reliable method, unlike offsetting in ZBrush.
I understand what's happening here. However my object is made up of 3 subtools. And when I Groupsplit them into individual pieces they behaved incorrectly. It's hard to explain. I am going to try to separate them again.
Also you point out my base mesh isnt't square so it's causing problems.
Is there a better way to set-up my base mesh for this kind of workflow?
I think next time I will sculpt each brick from the start and try to compose on the zbrush canvas. I will also import a square image from photoshop as a design guide. (As suggested to me on another Thread)
m4dcow - Does that method retain Polypaint by chance?
Yes it does, I did notice that coming back from maya it didn't retain the polygroups properly, but you can just manually hide the extra pieces. To export you would merge all the subtools together with subtool master, or just export each subtool as it's own obj.
Edit: Two more things regarding your workflow.
A - If you want to preserve polypaint when using decimation master, go to Preferences: DecimationMaster: Use and Keep Polypaint. You can also define how important the Polypaint information is to the Decimation process.
B - Since you have all your blocks arranged and only need one planar view of the whole thing, did you delete all the unnecessary side/back faces yet? I recall you using beveled cubes when arranging them in Softimage. If 5/6ths of the tool's faces aren't really contributing to your view of the wall, that alone should free up some of your scene.
Because now I can send a decimated version back to Softimage to tile over the necessary parts...and then when I bake in xnormal. I'll bake from the HP texture instead of the vertex paint right???
In regards to your question. I did create a optimized High poly in zbrush by deleting faces away from the camera. Howerver when I baked it down in xnormal I'm getting this weird problem.
I know I kinda gave up on the plane method in these screenshots..but I just wanted to get a bake down lol. So much time learning proper workflow! aha
There should be 4 pics on this link that show details of my xnormal problem.
http://img857.imageshack.us/g/xnormalproblemhp.jpg/
EDIT: It looks like my bake is "looking" at the back faces of my High poly instead of the front?
Thanks again everyone, I feel i'm getting closer now.
though makes a fucking huge obj when you export out for xnormal.
9 million polygons appears to slow down zbrush. : )
I also was running out of ram trying to bake in xnormal. I can't upgrade to 8 gigs unless i use 64 bit right?
Any ideas on my above baking problem? I'm SO CLOSE. aha
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/859/xnormalproblemresult.jpg/
I tried different textures sizes in xnormal. 512 and 1024. I realize 9million is overkill. But xnormal should still bake down to my plane low poly right?
Thanks for the book link btw!
For any tool shorter in length than the document, you would have to offset/tile the document first in order to position the desired location / gap so that it's in the middle of the document. Draw out the tool, do your edits, and then drop it in place.
For any tool that is supposed to run the same length as the document, you could turn on wrap mode (set to 1) under the Brush:Curve settings to ensure it is seamless.
What does the Displace function do exactly>?
To what extent would you want to edit the brick after dropping it? I think the closest you'd be able to get without having each brick as a subtool would be to project the result of the document's pixols onto a new planar mesh.
But the best way is projecting a grabbed displacement map over a new plane would get me back into sculpting mode?
Ideally it would displace up and not out to keep the seamlessness in tact.
Edit: Just did a quick test, displacement seems to work very well as far as making a new meshes' borders seamless so I would probably stick with that.
Cheers all who posted, as I pretty much wanted to ask the same questions.
Thought I'd bump it as there are some useful answers in here that others might find valuable.
This is a great tutorial. I could use this a lot. There are a couple of places where I get hung up on, which is the Stage 2 part. I wish it could be a little more descriptive. Sorry a bit noob on this.
Never mind found a great demo here that help resolve the gaps I was having.
http://eat3d.com/free/zbrush_tile
Cheers!