beginner's question. How to import zbrush project to maya for retopology?
polycounter lvl 3
Hi all,
I'm a bit confused with the correct procedure of importing a sculpt from zbrush to maya for retopology. Once I'm done with the sculpting in zbrush do I need to bring down the mesh to the lowest subdivision level before importing into maya, or if this is not nessesary? Do i need to know anything else? for example do i need to use zbrush decimation and then go to maya for retopology?
thank you so much for your time.
Replies
I would also suggest that you look more into the baking process (and the general 'modern' workflow as a whole), because it looks like you havent really understand the why yet, and you're asking for the how atm. Good luck!
Im doing a figure atm and just the blank highpoly is 8 mil points. A fully costumed character can run anywhere between 12 mil and 20 mil points, and being on a humble laptop I dont want to convert those figures to polys by exporting them from zB and try and open them in my 3d app. You can decimate your hipoly for baking but means loosing detail (if thats acceptable to you then stop reading). Using a 3rd party app for baking lets you keep all the detail of your hipoly and the external app will only use the hipoly as reference for baking.
There are literally loads of baking and texturing apps available for this purpose. I use Substance painter, but you can also use Marmoset toolbag for example, and if you want a free program xNormal is super.
The strategy I use for baking textures is:
1/ Make a duplicate/s of the final hipoly/s in zB. If your character has a costume and accessories your highpoly figure could be anywhere from 2 to 20 subtools.
2/ Use decimation master on the duplicate/s and decimate the duplicate/s in stages to ensure the highest level of detail for the lowest polycount. That would be 20%, 10%, 5%, 2% and often down to as low as 1%. Depending on the amount of subD levels the tool has. Subtools with lower levels of division wil collapse at around 2% so keep an eye on the decimated mesh and only decimate to its lowest acceptable level before it collapses.
3/ Merge the decimated meshes (if the figure is constructed from multiple tools) into one mesh.
4/ Open your 3D app and place a cube in the center of the viewport. In this case Maya. Scale the cube to something like 1.8 meters high by 0.5 meters wide and 0.5 meters deep (or the final real world measurements of your character). Make the cube semi transparent for convenience and place it with its base at 0,0,0 in the viewport. I dont know if you have to enable GoZ in Maya, but if you have to do it now and leave the application open.
5/ Reopen zB if you closed it.
6/ Goz the decimated version of your character from zB to Maya.
7/ Depending on how Maya handles GoZeded meshes adjust the position and scale of your decimated mesh by altering the export values at the bottom of the tool menu. You should be able to GoZ your decimated mesh and alter the export values until it fits perfectly into the maya cube. When you have reached that stage save the zB tool and it will save the export settings.
8/ Close zB.
9/ Now you have a decimated copy of your figure in Maya at the right size and position. Retopo your character. Break the character into as many parts as you need to avoid adjacent polys for the final bake. If your final character is to be animated include the right amount of loops in the right position to support deformation.
10/ Uv the firnal lowpoly/s and export the result/s to a disk.
11/ Open zB and merge all the subtools at their highest subD level so you have a highpoly version of your figure to bake textures from. Depending on your retopology in Maya you can merge the tools into baking groups, like head and hands, shirt and trousers, jacket and boots and so on.
12/ Export the highpoly/s to a destination on a disk.
13/ Depending on what app you are using to bake with you may need to use a plugin for Maya to export your uved lowpoly mesh/s. If you are using an app like xnormal, open it and point it to the low and high poly mesh disk destinations.
14/ Hit bake.
Have fun!
You could just remesh a copy of the highpoly but the mesh wouldnt be ideal for animation or games. You only need to uv your retopologized lowpoly resulting mesh in Maya. Send that to a disk. Use xNormal for example to create textures for the lowpoly using the details from the highpoly.
Its quite a process when you do it for the first time.