I recently had my zBrush file get corrupted however, I still have the unsculpted .OBJ and an export of the fully sculpted mesh. The topology and polygons are identical. I just need to find a way to replace the SDiv 5 of the unsculpted mesh with the already sculpted one. Is there a way to do this?
There’s an easy way, when it works, if you go to the sdiv 5 tool and go to Tools/Geometry and press “reconstruct subdiv” sometimes the gods smile on you and you get your subd levels back just as easy as that. If it works, you can reconstruct again and again all the way down to your first original level.
If it fails it will tell you in the upper left hand top message.
There’s a couple other ways, but it may be just as easy as that so try that first.
If it fails you can append your unsculpted tool to your highly sculpted tool as a subtool.
Then, line them up scalewise identically as possible. Go to your subtool palette and select the low density mesh, making sure that both subtools are visible with the eye icon active on both. Then press ProjectAll after setting your PA Blur to 8. Default is 10 but that’s bugged currently. (or a factor of 8 works as well just try 8 first).
You may get some errata in the transfer of high res details but most of that stuff can be adjusted with a smoothing brush set to low intensity fairly painlessly.
Another thing you can try if you’re having probs. with the other methods, you can create a displacement map from your highly sculpted mesh, then use that map on your unsculpted mesh to apply displacement, which should conform the actual geometry based on the heightmap info of the displacement map. I’ve never done that personally but I do think it’s possible if you need to do that.
I was able to get it to work, however, it was not from any of the suggestions. I’m not sure entirely how I got it to work but the general idea of what I was doing was I had the unsculpted mesh to SDiv 5 and clicked to Import the sculpted mesh. Contrary to the usual menu that pops up about a change in topology, it updated the SDiv 5 with the sculpted mesh as well as propagated the sculpted information all the way down to the Level 0 mesh. Have you ever heard of this happening before?