Importing meshes that contain ngons into zbrush?

Ridergraal · Oct 2020

Hi, it has always been my understanding that you cannot import any mesh that contains ngons into ZBrush, however, I have seen alot of hard surface tutorials and workflows were artists import the mesh that contains ngons just fine and are able to dynamically subdivide it after creasing it. However, any time I import a mesh into zbrush it destorys the mesh or there are faces missing.

Am i missing something?

Thanks in advance.

Ghogiel · Oct 2020

add a turn to poly modifier to the model before export or export with FBX instead of OBJ.

Ridergraal · Oct 2020

Ghogiel said:

add a turn to poly modifier to the model before export or export with FBX instead of OBJ.

I am using blender and I don’t believe blender has a poly modifier equivalent?

cryrid · Oct 2020

You can import meshes with ngons, they'll just be converted to more compatible geometry. I use OBJ instead of FBX, as Zbrush will ask what you want to do with detected ngons (the options being Quads and Triangles, or Symmetrical Triangles Only).

Ideally manually fixing them in Blender first would give you the most control over the topology.

Ridergraal · Oct 2020

cryrid said:

You can import meshes with ngons, they'll just be converted to more compatible geometry. I use OBJ instead of FBX, as Zbrush will ask what you want to do with detected ngons (the options being Quads and Triangles, or Symmetrical Triangles Only).

Ideally manually fixing them in Blender first would give you the most control over the topology.

Yes, but whenever I get to this stage my mesh is destoryed by zbrush,

PolyHertz · Oct 2020

Ridergraal said:
Yes, but whenever I get to this stage my mesh is destoryed by zbrush,

If your mesh is being 'destroyed' on import then there's something wrong with the model other then ngons. Zbrush has been able to handle ngons for a long time (at least 10-15 years now), so it's very unlikely that's the issue.

Try exporting as OBJ from Blender, then importing that file back into blender, and see if anythings changed. More then likely you have some non-manifold geometry in there. The Remesh modifier is also an option.

Kanni3d · Oct 2020

Exporting with n-gons/non-triangulated geometry via obj still produces holes, which is why I use turn to poly modifier to close up any ngons. An equivalent is to simply triangulate your mesh then export as obj.

Importing meshes that contain ngons into zbrush?

Replies