ZBrushCentral

ZBrush to KeyShot and back... or rather not.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi Everyone!
ZBer? You are missing.
POKE!

Im trying to go back and forth in a couple of diferent ways between ZBrush and KeyShot. Strangely it works better doing this between Blender and ZBrush, or rather it works, where as with KeyShot it does not.

In KeyShot 6 pro there’s an export thing that sends out .Obj files, when I open them in ZBrush I get a mangled mesh (which looks fine in Blender).
I find this a little odd as the original mesh is actually from ZBrush.

Theres also a button in KeyShot that seems like its supposed to send you back to ZBrush, but as near as I can tell it does nothing at all… It’s the last button to the right on the top row of tiny buttons, hovering the mouse over it pops up a thing that says “return to Zbrush” but nothing happens.

As near as I can tell, everything going out of ZBrush into KeyShot is on a one way trip, is that correct? If so it doesn’t even work as well as unsupported things like GOB (GOZ for Blender). This, for some odd reason has me convinced that I’m doing it, and numerous other things wrong.

The last problem is even more stupid, I got KeyShot Pro because it has animation support, this apparently doesn’t come from ZBrush, like can I make a turntable in ZBrush and send it to Keyshot?

I have tried asking on the KeyShot forums about stuff but its another language over there and one that I dont understand. For example I tried to figure out why I cant get the mouse to point at a polygroup and I dont even know if they know what a polygroup is, or why I want to drag a material onto one… It’s not their fault, I come from using Sculptris and they come from the world of making cars look very shiny in whatever it is you do such things in.

So…
Is it a one way trip, once out of ZBrush its just a rendering engine?

Cheers!
Mealea

#2

I’ll check this for you when I get home. We are talking the Keyshot Pro for ZBrush, right?

About the polygroups thing. I usually colour by polygroups in ZBrush which then allows me to click on the coloured groups in Keyshot and apply different materials.

#3

Thanks Dillster!
And yah, KeyShot 6.3 Pro 64bit.
Oh, I found the stuff I was after animation wise, so stupid of me:
Under Window menu there is Animation, in that is a wizard button, that pops up something for doing Turntables and some other stuff! It doesn’t bring up a window, it brings up a panel in the main window.
But:
YAY! ANIMATION!!!

#4

Please note, this is not a complaint, its just some problems that I have run into. Fixable problems I think.

So, I tested this stuff a little more, and some confirmation would be cool as Im not totally clear on this.

The "Return to ZBrush " button is a non-feature, it does nothing at all.

Importing .ZPR files in Keyshot generates errors “no 3D information in file” so closing ZBrush to free up memory and importing stuff manually doesn’t work. Meaning you cant have just KeyShot running.

Exporting .Obj files from KeyShot results in Geometry that ZBrush cant deal with but which oddly looks ok in Blender. Try this: Send an object to KeyShot, export said stuff as .Obj file, import into Zbrush. (I use the “Create Pattern” thingy in KeyShot and its cool, but cant go back into ZBrush with it).

KeyShot can’t see PolyGroups or SubTools as separate geometry unless they have diferent materials on them (as I understand it, and I’m not saying I do), so when we apply a material to a polygroup and it bleeds into the next polygroup and looks terrible we are stuck with it. This can be fixable, but its very very difficult and time consuming (making one polygroup not bleed into another can take dozens of tries).

Placing material on an area in KeyShot can be nearly impossible unless you know what the polygroup is named (Using the tree list thing in the upper right) (good luck on knowing that!) especially if they are smaller areas. An example of this would be trying to make stripes, the actual area you are pointing at is nowhere near your mouse because (I think) KeyShots scaling is off in some way that when you zoom in, your mouse is not in the same place it appears in X and Y. This results in you dropping the material somewhere other than where you are pointing.

Another problem is with 4R7 Pn. Adding materials to a lot of polygroups causes memory to start to go crazy. This doesn’t happen in 4R6 and below, I can change the material on any number of PolyGroups and ZBrush stays stable, 4R7 takes my whole system down with it when I pass a certain point (I dont know what that point is, it seems to change).

Basicly the Bridge we have to use is a dead end, there’s no way back and there’s no way off.
What we need, and what works far better is GoB (This is GoZ for Blender, something that ought to be official by now because it works really well).
GoZ for KeyShot, or GoK I guess, would be a vast improvement.

Does anyone else see any of this stuff?

Cheers!
Mealea