Exporting My First Polypaint .OBJ

system · February 4, 2012, 9:35pm

Hi,

Before I begin let me say I’m a complete beginner to ZBrush (and 3D in general).

I’ve been trying to follow a tutorial video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9wYyDOvWJU) which demonstrates a very simple polypaint job. A simple smiley face is painted on a white sphere, then a UV scheme is assigned, and then a texture is created. After that the result is exported out as a .OBJ file.

Now I’ve pretty much followed this tut to the letter, but the texture I’m getting doesn’t look anything like in the video. It looks kind of blocky and fragmented. And when I export the .obj file and import it into another program (Poser Pro 2012), the sphere also has this blocky, messed-up texture as well. I also get the same result importing into other apps (Rhino).

So, why is there this difference, and how do I get a texture that looks right? As I said I’m following exactly the same steps.

Note: I’ve added a screen shot of the texture:

Thanks.

Further:- Sorry for this additional posting, but I’ve just tried the same exercise again. In the original video, it asked me to delete the default UV mapping and choose PUVTiles. But I’ve discovered that if I DON’T delete the default UV mapping, I get the CORRECT texture. So now I’m wondering, first, WHY does PUVTiles not work? And 2nd, WHAT IS the default UV mapping that ZBrush chooses??

Can someone answer these questions?

Attachments

system · February 5, 2012, 6:11pm

Hello? Anyone?

Cryrid · February 5, 2012, 6:36pm

What you’re getting is a perfectly normal result looking at it. The texture looks like a mess human eyes, but should appear on the model just fine.

Those Auto UVs essentially give each polygon their own UV island (PUV and GUV will attempt to group them more) , which is why it looks so blocky (you’re basically seeing the a bunch of square polygons represented: you can visualize this by using Tools: UVMap: UV Morph). It’s not very suitable for a final UV map used in something like a game, but it works very well for quickly storing polypaint information with little distortion (which you may want to do to save masks, or to bake the polypaint to a different mesh in an external program).

If you want more control over the UVs for a final result and have it look more like a traditionally unwrapped texture, you may want to look into using the UV Master plugin of AUV/GUV/PUV

system · February 5, 2012, 7:13pm

I’ve found using the UV Master and Multi-Map Exporter plug-ins is the easiest way to get your objects into Poser. Both of these plug-ins are much easier to learn than their equivalent Zbrush default features IMHO.

system · February 5, 2012, 8:10pm

To jonbo64: I was under the impression that using UV Master was only necessary if you wanted to create UV islands that could be easily edited by a human using a 2D program (such as Photoshop) - I don’t really want to manually edit the islands, but I’ll look at UV Master. Will it make things easier?

To Cryid: I’m still pretty confused about this PUV stuff. You say that the texture looks perfectly normal but should appear on the model just fine - BUT IT DOESN’T - that’s my point. When I import the .obj into another app, this is what I get (in Rhino):

What good is PUV (or any other auto UV mapping) if I get the above result?

system · February 5, 2012, 8:34pm

Hey Stretch, that’s only one feature of uv master. Another is the ability to set where you have your seams on your uv’s. But aside from that, I can use the symetrical unwrap with basic default settings and get a usable uv for poser. So it’s really easy to use.