ZBrushCentral

Importing a Zbrush/Sculptris Model into Mudbox

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello everyone, my name is C-Rex, and I am new to the forums. For my college project, I am currently in the process of making a character model of a velociraptor warrior of sorts. I created most of the initial model in Sculptris, exported it as a .obj file and then imported it into zBrush to do a few more edits.

Unfortunately at the moment it seems that I am stuck, as I am hoping to import it into Mudbox to texture and pose it (I prefer Mudbox’s painting system to Zbrush’s) but whenever I import it I get a few error meshes mentioning “too many vertexes” or something. I am able to import my model, but whenever I try and paint it it says I need to create UV mapping or something, and it usually ends up freezing whenever I create UV mapping, and I’m unaware of how many UV maps I need to make for the model to paint it properly.

How would I go about sorting these problems out? I really want to be able to import my model into Mudbox and pose/paint it. :cry:

#2

how many points is your model?
do you have a lowpoly version, how many points is it?
do you know how to do a proper unwrap?
does your mesh have subD levels?
is it multiple parts?

#3

Isn’t this a question for the Mudbox forum? :wink:

#4

I’m not to aware of many things, as I’m a bit of a newbie, but it is quite a high poly model and I don’t have a low poly version I’m afraid. I don’t know what you mean by points I’m afraid, but it has a lot of triangles. Also, I don’t know how to do an unwrap, it doesn’t have any subdivision levels, and there are no multiple parts.

Sorry for being an utter newb, but this problem’s really bugging me. :confused:

#5

The problem is you want to work in Mudbox, which requires UVs, and your system and/or mudbox can’t unwrap your mesh without crashing because it is too dense.
Zbrush doesn’t require an unwrap because it is using vertex color information rather than UVs.

It sounds like you need to fill in a lot of the gaps in your knowledge of 3D before trying what you are.

Also, you can try the mudbox forums to see if someone there can help you with getting an auto unwrap in mudbox.

#6

In the interest of using zbrush to play nicely with other programs (including mudbox) and being more of a friendly community; you’ll want to put zbrush’s retopology and UV tools to use. Like Beta_Channel suggested, you probably have a really vertex-heavy mesh which would cause even a good computer and good 3d programs to struggle under the pressure of trying to process all that information (it’s something even zbrush struggles with).

Check out some of the videos and documentation on QRemesher (especially page 21 of the ZBrush4_R4_whats_new.pdf in your \Pixologic\ZBrush 4R5\Documentation folder), or use the classic zsphere retoplogy method (which I believe is demonstrated here).

Basically the goal is to:


  • Create a duplicate version of the mesh that has a much lower polygon count
  • Use zbrush’s UV tools like UV Master to create UVs for this new mesh (or take advantage of GOZ to send the low poly mesh to an external program, unwrap it there, and import it the UVs back into zbrush)
  • Use zbrush’s Project All tool to get the detail from the original sculpt back onto your new UV’d mesh.

You’ll then have a version of your sculpt that has all the detail, along with some UVs and lower subdivision levels in case you want to export and paint in mudbox, photoshop, etc.

I don’t know what you mean by points I’m afraid, but it has a lot of triangles.

A polygon is a flat shape consisting of straight lines (edges) that are joined to form a closed chain or circuit. The points where two edges meet are the polygon’s vertices (singular: vertex). – link

The following images should help make things a bit more clear than a long wiki article about math:
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2012/en_us/images/comp_snap01.png
http://m5designstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/maya_polygon.jpg
http://140.129.20.249/~jmchen/cg/docs/rendering%20pipeline/rendering/wi_polygon.gif
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/eps-gif/PolygonEdge_1000.gif

The terminology can sometimes vary from program to program, artist to artist.
Polygons are sometimes called faces.
Edges are sometimes called lines.
Vertices are sometimes called points.