Hello! I wanted to bring to attention a few things regarding compatibility.
Allegorithmic’s software is becoming more and more widely used in the gaming industry. In particular right now I am talking about substance painter. With their introduction of baking capability right in painter many of us are trying to shift our baking workflow into this software to speed things up and allow us to be more creative quicker. One of the nice features is the ability to bake objects using matching names to avoid having to explode, or bake separately and combine then bring those results back into something like painter or otherwise.
It is with this function, which I much want to use, that there are issues.
Painter will use not the file name, but the name of the object from the software it was exported from. There are two issues with this:
- Zbrush does not export the name of a subtool as data within an OBJ which breaks the matching feature.
- Zbrush won’t allow you to name something with an underscore, if you try it will change it to a dash. You can import a mesh with a name that has an underscore and it will retain it, but it wont let you type one inside of zbrush. This causes some difficulty even if you were to export all the tools named correctly as an FBX. Painter allows you to customize the high and low suffix, but the opposite of this issue is true in maya; you can not type a “-” without it changing it to an underscore. The opposite of Zbrush, meaning you have to bring your high poly or low poly into a separate program that does allow underscores or dashes to get the names to match up.
I would love it if Zbrush would allow you to type an underscore and not force capitalize the first letter of any name you type.
-Update: I’ve just talked with Allegorithmic and found that they have created some workarounds. When exporting OBJs painter can be flagged to use the file name instead of the mesh name since zbrush doesn’t output one in the file, and the way to flag this is to make sure GRP is turned off at export. This is turned on by default so it has be done per sub tool on export which isn’t too big a deal. I do usually like to turn it off anyway though as meshes will come in to other programs a bit strange sometimes with that. Polygroups is one thing, but sometimes it just has random chunks of unwelded mesh.
Would it be possible to make the group setting not be specific to each subtool for export - but just globally on or off? Turn it on and every subtool exported while on will have it on, turn it off and each subtool will have it off until otherwise turned on. That would make a little more sense to me - just a request to consider.