ZBrushCentral

Help Needed: Workflow between Z brush and Solidworks

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello all I am new to the forum. I did search around a bit but could not find an answer to what i needed. I hope I am posting this in the correct section. if not apologies.

I am a sculptor at heart and an Industrial Designer bt Trade. I am looking at adding ZBrush to my toolset.

Has anyone had any experience with a workflow between Zbrush and SolidWorks or Z Brush and Rhino3D?

I am looking to use Zbrush as a form of quick 3D sketch up of organic forms. I have found some videos online of how to bring a Zbrush model(.obj?) into rhino and using the tsplines add in translate the geometry into nurbs surfacing. Although I dont have z brush yet i am trying to experiment with bringing meshes into rhino and translating them. I would like to also go the other direction as well. If I have a solidworks model i would like to be able to bring it into Zbrush to be able to modify it quickly to conceptualize.

Has anyone had experiance with these two things:

  1. creating a model in zbrush and then bringing it successfully into solid works or even rhino as a definable nurbs surface model.

  2. bringing a solidworks nurbs surface model into Zbrush for use as a starting point or at least a reference model.

Workflow between solidworks and Zbrush would be the ultimate end goal. I dont mind if I have to use Rhino as an intermediate though.

thank you in advance for any help

#2

Hopefully some of this info can help you out:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?175157-zbrush-to-solidworks-for-3d-printing
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?178692-Solidworks-Catia-to-Zbursh

It appears that your model from Solidworks is going to be triangles and ZBrush prefers quads. After you’ve got it into ZBrush, depending on your overall needs you can use ZRemesher to retopologize the model into quads so that you can better work with it in ZBrush. If you need to get it back to Solidworks you would need to export as triangles, but that’s pretty easy since each quad can automatically be split diagonally to get that. The catch is if you need your topology when you leave ZBrush to be the same as what you brought in. In that case you won’t be able to retopologize and so will have some limits when it comes to sculpting.

#3

It’s not really a matter of converting between triangles and quads, nor is it about converting Zbrush to Solidworks. It’s a matter of converting polygons (triangles and/or quads) to nurbs (Cad). It’s easier to convert nurbs to polygons than the other way around. It’s a similar idea to the difference between raster and vector graphics, if you’re familiar with that polygons are the raster and nurbs are the vectors.

Some software will read both, usually CAD programs and I believe Solidworks does read both. You should be able to export a CAD model to a polygon format (OBJ is the recommended standard, especially for Zbrush). However as noted Zbrush doesn’t play nice with triangles as its brush and toolset algorithms work much better with quads. Which is interesting as everything gets converted to triangles in the end, a quad is just two even triangles put together. This means there’s usually an extra step converting from a regular triangulated polygon model into an all quads, Zremesher is a big step in that direction.

The real question isn’t whether software will convert between the two formats of nurbs (CAD) and polygons (Zbrush), it’s about what your end result requires. Why do you need to convert to nurbs? Can you use the polygon model in relation with your CAD models? I could be wrong but the only reason that I understand to convert to a nurbs format is if the final output machine (CNC or Printer, although every 3D printer that I know of uses polygon STL files) absolutely requires the mathematical format of (vector) nurbs and won’t even read or convert a raster (polygon) format.

Of course most of my experience is with organic models and 3D printing but I have a little bit of the CAD and mechanical modelling experience so there may be other reasons for the conversion.

Right now the software and time it takes to properly convert from polygon to nurbs can be expensive. Is it really what you need?

#4

Polygon is the way to go with CNC machining and Rapid Prototype. Surfacing CAD software will typically have a save as option that will convert to polygonal in the form of .stl for this purpose. SolidWorks is limited to converting to this format and will only bring it back in as a read only graphic. You can see it but it is not really tangible in any other way. Not very usable. Rhino on the other hand can work in both mesh and nurbs and with the help of a plugin called Tsplines can convert the mesh to nurbs. I know it may sound like I know a lot about this for being the one to pose the question but this is just a “rough overview” of just some of this process(I have read about and reasoned out based on assumptions of what I know). As another poster mentioned there may be subtleties to the process that make it more difficult than this, problematic and potentially impossible. Additionally I have found info on z brush to SW but not the other way around.

#5

That is what I am trying to figure out. Is itpossible, feasible and is it worth it

#6

I´m agree with everything the collegues said before. Bringing to Zbrush it´s not a big deal. Just export as STL in rhino and import in Zbrush using the 3D printer exporter. In Zbrush i recomend to use dynamesh if don´t want to loose any of your details. I use this specially for jewellery. Then you can use all Zbrush features to modiffy freely your mesh. After done you should run a decimation Master and reduce your polycount before exporting in STL. The problem is how to convert triangulated meshes into nurbs. I found a very powerfull program that may help you with this task better than rhino Tsplines. It´s called RapidformXOR. It´s used to transfer 3D scan data to parametric objects.

Hope this could help

#7

I guess what I’m trying to ask is do you really need to bring it into Rhino? Is there a step and/or tool in Rhino that you can’t do in Zbrush? If there is then can it be done before bringing it into Zbrush, meaning that Zbrush is the final step of the process?

I’m not familiar with Rhino (I know of it and that’s about it) but is there really an advantage of bringing something back into Rhino after it’s been sculpted in Zbrush?

#8

my final desired outcome is into SolidWorksand it will be used as reference geometry to build engineering files around or if lucky it can actually be used has a foundation for the gym the tree in engineering modifications

I want to use the brush as a quick fluid and organic way of developing up concept designs and forms for products that will later be engineered in CAD software …solidworks.

as powerful and flexible has something like SolidWorks is it was never really intended to make really organic forms so it is a bit of a hassle to do so

my intent is to use the brush as a very free form tool for developing those forms

#9

I do want to be able to run the work flow both directions during the design process. The end goal for what I do is to have nurbs based SW files for use in manufacturing tooling

  1. bring existing nurbs (SW) into zbrush in a mesh format is fine so I can use it as a reference or even a starting geometry to work off of in zbrush for concept development

  2. bring the z brush files into Solid Works to use as a reference to develop parametric geometry around or hopefully with any luck I might be able to use the imported geometry as foundation geometry for modeling.

I want to use the power of zbrush for fleshing out and developing organic forms and making quick iterations in the early concept phases of a my product development

#10

Polygon ZBrush -> STL to RapidformXOR-> Parasolid to Solidworks
Parasolid Solidworks->RapidformXOR to STL->Import STL in Zbrush

#11

http://docs.pixologic.com/features/main-features/import-export/

#12

I will have to look up rapidform. Is it an expensive program?

I was hoping to use rhino somehow as I already have it but I will look it up as another option.

#13

Looks like it is more for translating mesh formats to other mesh formats but could be wrong.

I need to get it to a nurbs based surface model

#14

Export .stl, import then into Rhino.

#15

I think he’s asking more to convert from mesh to nurbs and vice versa, not necessarily from Zbrush to Rhino. It’s not so much the software conversion but the model format. Unless I’m reading that wrong.

#16

correct

I just happened to find a tutorial on how to do it with Rhino. Since I have Rhino I wanted to know if anyone had had experience with it and how stable/solid of a work flow it is. Glean a little insight and see if it would work for my purposes.

The software is more coincidental. I want to use ZBrush. Happen to have Rhino and our platform we use for engineering is SW. Was just hoping Rhino(with Tsplines plugin) would be a viable solution for conversion as I already have it.