Heya everyone!
I am a longtime CG professional, but new to ZBrush. I am developing an art pipeline/workflow for a game project which involves baking displacement maps to a low poly base mesh, which has roughly 2000 vertices ( subD 1), and considering using subD 2 and subD 3 as LOD’s.
For most characters, no re-topology will take place ( only for special cases ), and the sculpts will often contain “hard surface” details, so it is extremely important that sculpted straight lines will continue to be straight lines.
Anyhoo, I spent quite a bit of time and developed a procedure for generating smooth subdivisions that have the minimum amount of texture stretching as possible ( methinks ). As you may know, the smoothing in the first few subdivisions can pull the vertices away from their initial shape, resulting in UV warping, since the UV’s were generated with the unsmoothed vertices.
I’ve attached two images to illustrate the warping that I am talking about. For organic sculpts, this is rarely ever an issue or noticeable, but for hard surface sculpting, it is usually obvious where the warping takes place.
I hacked together a custom procedure to generate the initial subD’s so they minimize the warping, as illustrated in the attachments. I am familiar with the “adaptive” setting when exporting maps, and do use it, but get the best results when I also use the special subD smoothing.
So my questions are;
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Before I proceed with this, is there an existing feature ( or procedure ) that I am unaware of that will achieve similar or same results?
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Is this something that the community as a whole would find useful ( as I might consider making a publicly available utility so others can achieve the same results )?
Thx in advance 
