Reading und understanding ZTL-Files

[kogen]

Hello everybody,

I'd like to start a new project at university and for this purpose I'd like to use ZBrush.
But before I could start anything there must be found a way to open and understand ZTL-Files. When I open a ZTL file in for example Notepad++ I just get cryptic signs and some readable text as well at the very start of the file.
So my question is: Are there any chances/possibilities to convert a cryptic ZTL file in something that can be read by humans?

Thanks for your time.

[marcus_civis]

The short answer is no. What you're looking at is Notepad's representation of a binary file. The readable text is mostly for identification purposes. ZBrush files are proprietary formats and further information as to their contents is not available.

If you want a format that ZBrush can use, and that can be easily understood, take a look at the OBJ format. It's a text-based 3D format and is easy to understand.

[kogen]

Hei marcus_civis, thanks for your reply.

Yeah, I've already thought about OBJ, but actually I was hoping to get an answer that would have been more like: "Yes, maybe you could open it via...". The problem with OBJ is that it stores only vertex and face data in one "status". That is to say, I can get the position of vertices in only one specific subdivision. If I want to get the new position of the vertices and the newly created vertices + their position I would have to re-export a higher SubD right out of ZBrush.
So actually I was hoping the information would have been coded somewhere in the ZTL file. So I would have had the possibility to access a higher subdivison of a model right in this file.
The only way I see now is to store multiple versions of one model in a couple of OBJs. Afterwards I might re-calculate the points and their distortion vectors by subtracting one model from another... not sure about it yet. :(

[Crusoe the Painter]

Blender supports multi-res meshes now, and is opensource. While it can't handle as high poly counts, I'd look there to see about how it is stored in files.