From Max to ZBrush - ways to keep harder edges.

[system]

Hello,

I’ve been trying to find the best way to bring my meshes from Max to ZBrush.

The main problem is how to keep harder edges, while maintaining evenly distributed polygons - how is this usually done? I have experimented with turning smooth off when subdividing the mesh for the first couple of times, but sometimes it leads to hard edges (or sudden transitions in surface) in places where I didn’t mean to have them.

I know about smoothing groups plugin and that it apparently still works with Zbrush 4. GoZ doesn’t seem to care about smoothing groups(?).

However, I’m not a big fan of Max’s smoothing groups, call it lack of experience, but I find it so much easier to use edge loops to define my hard(ish) edges. Out of the box, this method doesn’t work with ZBrush very well, because you end up with unevenly distributed geometry - is there a way around this? Or should I be using some other method all together?

Thanks!

[nimajneb]

The best way I can think to do this with Zbrush is to go outside the box a bit. Design your mesh with your hard-edge loops in Max (or your other modeling application), so that when you hit it with smoothing you have the basic edging you want. Make sure you’ve got good UV’s for a later step. Bring that into Zbrush, smooth it out so you have it with the non-uniform poly’s. Next do a remesh and project to get something you can sculpt on that approximates your form. Discard your old mesh, do all your sculpting work on this new “ugly” mesh. Next, export this new sculpted mesh to an obj. Then using a projection tool like xNormal, you should be able to create a displacement map using your original good UV’s hard edge model as the source and the ugly sculpted mesh as the target. The problem with doing this in Zbrush is that displacement map generation is dependent on topology, you can only make the map from one sub level to a higher one. xNormal will let you break that dependency and allow you to have your clean mesh and your high res displacements (and polypainting, if you bake it out to a PUV tiled map.)

A one thing to mention though, I’ve not yet tried this. It’s very much theory at the moment. If I had to do what you’re asking about though, this is how I would approach it.

[system]

Thanks for the idea,

Wow, that sounds complicated! I just realized that I’m actually probably doing this for no reason, at least on this particular project. Right now, taking smooth off for the first 2 subdivs seems to do the trick, then I just reshape it from there.

The (wrong) reason why I wanted to get this to work, was that I though that I need to keep that original mesh (from Max) as the lowpoly version. Well, it seems that it’s a lot easier to just sculpt freely and model the low poly afterwards

[nimajneb]

There’s another problem you will run into using your original mesh to sculpt. Those long polys will kick your behind when you get to polypainting (assuming you do that). So I would still divorce myself of using that lowpoly mesh as my base (turning off smooth for two iterations and then working it), if you intend to paint in in Zbrush. For that you need nice uniformly sized polys as well.

[system]

True,

This wasn’t a problem before I started adding those loops for tightening corners, as I would chop longer polygons to more even ones in Max, but either way, I guess it’s better to start from ZBrush, when possible, and in my case after a I gather a little more experience in sculpting.