Hello I’m looking for some advice on fleshing out my Maya > Zbrush > Maya workflow. Any tips and advice is welcome, thanks.
I’ve used Lightwave and Zbrush together back and forth smoothely for awhile now, but I am at a standstill as to some issues I’m wondering about when it comes to doing the same with Maya.
My goal is to:
set up my Low Poly version of my character that I have in Lightwave and put him into Maya making blendshapes from all the ‘morph targets’ i had for all the lip sync positions of his version in Lightwave.
Also i want to be able to take that low poly guy and bring him into ZBrush to completely detail him with color and normal maps for high detailing, and use my low poly version in Maya as a proxy for the viewports to animate him then render his high detail one.
this all seems like it should be relatively easy to figure out using a few tutorials, forum searching and common sense right? … well here’s what i’m caught up on…
I made all his ‘morph targets’ in LW into separate objects… exported as OBJs.
When i import them into maya and create ‘blend shapes’ for him out of them, when i try to animate them, it all looks like total crap … vertices going all over like his whole body is melting…
that is UNTIL… i convert my low poly guy into a SUBDIV.
then all the blendshapes work perfectly… as well as they did in LW when they were morph targets.
so that’s fine right? but this is a problem because at this point… what do i do about exporting my guy into ZBrush as an OBJ ?? that would work all fine until i export my normal, color and displacement maps (might not use displacement maps) …
how the hell are the UVs from
ZBRUSH doesn’t take maya subdivs exported as objs… i would have to take the subdiv that came from the low poly guy… and convert back to a poly model? then export that obj into zbrush from maya… and at that point it’s super high res ,… because it’s been made poly - subdiv - poly - then needs to be subdiv again to use the blendshapes?
honestly, this is kookoo for coco puffs.
could someone plz help me out with this?
just to recap so it’s not as confusing as possible…
*low poly guy in LW with morph targets.
*bring him in as an obj into maya and put all morphs as objs into him as blendshapes.
*only works after i make him a subdiv.
*at this point how do i retain my blendshapes and detail him in zbrush?
desired result = low poly guy to animate with with all blendshapes plus high res version rendered with super high detail zbrush maps and no poly-angle edges. (high enough for that)
thnx guys and gals.