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Converting a model of Zspheres & Dynamesh to Polymesh3D without loosing textures

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Just finished my Zbrush project where I built a car and figures using Zspheres and Dynamesh, sculpted and painted with several brushes. When the project was ready to export I applied Decimation Master to each subtool to decrease polygon count and extracted texture maps of them. That worked fine with most of them but not with my figures built with Zspheres. When I wanted to preprocess my figures in Decimation Master I received this warning:

Cannot pre-process current Tool!
Only valid Polymesh3D are supported.
Please, convert current Tool to Polymesh3D.

Extracting texture maps of them was not possible either because that option was absent for them.
So I see that I should convert my Zsphere models to Polymesh3D before further sculpting and painting (I thought tat was done already) If I convert it to Polymesh3D now, all the texture I painted on it will get lost now. How can I convert to Polymesh 3D but still keep my textures?oto3.jpg

#2

Yeah, it’s risky doing any sculpting/painting work on a zsphere preview since there are many ways to lose all that work (like accidentally pressing A). Converting it to a polymesh3d early on is always wise.

Fortunately, using Tool: Adaptive Skin: Make Adaptive Skin should create a new polymesh object that preserves your polypainting. You can do then append this new tool back to the car and then hide or delete the zsphere version.

#3

Thank you very much for your advice Cyrid

Making my Zphere based models Adaptive Skin worked for one of my two figures and I could extract its texture map as well but if I use the Decimation Master I loose the texture.

For the other figure however the Make Adaptive Skin button remained inactive (grey), so I couldn’t use it.

The difference of these two models is that I built a Zsphere armature for one of them and started sculpting and painting then, for the other one I also used Zsphere sketching on the Zsphere armature, then started sculpting and painting on it. And that one didn’t allow me to make Adaptive Skin.

#4

Ahh, ZSketch.

For that model, try dropping out of Preview Mode with the ‘A’ key (but save the tool before you do, just in case it doesn’t work). With zsketches, if Zbrush detects that the preview mesh has been sculpted/painted on then it will ask if you want to store the modified preview mesh as a new Polymesh3d. If you accept, then the new Tool that it creates should preserve your painted details (unlike if you just straight-up click the ‘MakePolymesh3D’ button).

Unless the original preview mesh was set to a dynamesh resolution of 0 then the resulting model that it creates will likely be very dense in geometry. You’ll probably have to duplicate the model, retopologize it, UV that, and then project the details from the dense tool over to the lighter UV’d one.

#5

If you are using ZSketch then you would use Unified Skin instead of Adaptive Skin to make a new skin. Any polypainting you do on a ZSketch will transfer to the newly made skin when you click “Make Unified Skin” in the “Tool > Unified Skin” subpalette.

#6

Cryrid, unfortunately pressing A immediately turned my model to Zsketch mode back without any questions.

Thank you Zber2, yes, Unified skin worked to make a new skin. I could build the texture maps afterwards but when exporting the maps as JPEG pictures Zbrush pretends to save the images but doesn’t save anything, not just the texture maps of the Zsphere-Zsketch models but any of them.

#8

Actually I could built the texture maps of some subtools of this project already. I used Zplugin / UV Master first to build the UV maps of all subtools, then used Tools / UV map to define map size and border, then used Tools / Texture Map to build the maps which worked actually fine for a couple of subtools.

But after working on these Zsphere-Zsketch figures using Unified Skin and Adaptive skin, I wanted to continue with texture maps, pressing Create / New from Polypaint I saw the texture in the texture map square, pressed clone texture and saw it in the texture square at left, then I opened the texture panel to export that texture just like I did successfully before. It pretended to save it, definitely to the right folder, showed the texture at actual size first, but then that texture map was not saved.

Not only those models from Zpheres but also models built from appended spheres had the same results although it worked with them before.