I am working between Maya LT 2018 and Zbrush 2018, however this is an issue I’ve come across time and again when I was working in Zbrush 4r8 as well. I am not using GoZ.
Simply, I export an fbx with standard settings from Maya, and when I import it into Zbrush, you get what you see in the picture. Seemingly random quads will be split and vertices will be disconnected. I can’t find an answer with google, so I’m hoping somebody here may have had the problem and solved it. My guess is a simple bug related to the newer versions communicating with each other? I’ll do some troubleshooting with different FBX versions, but it would be nice to know what is really going on.
Additionally, sometimes more than half of the model will be blackened, like the face normals were inverted, but it clears away with a touch of the smooth brush. In fact, the face normals are all correct, and this further leads me to believe there is some bit of information Zbrush is tagging the mesh with that travels with it to maya, and despite what alterations I make in Maya, that information stays there, and then causes conflicts when I bring the mesh back into Zbrush.
I tried different FBX versions, same results. I tried exporting as OBJ, same result. I tried initializing zbrush, same results. One curious thing is that I had applied a color fill in zbrush to part of the object, and even though I have changed material ID’s inside Maya, that color fill returns even when I reimport the FBX again. So there is some kind of information traveling from Zbrush to Maya, separate from the material ID, and it’s sticking around even when I edit the mesh, change materials, etc. This could be problem, but I have to figure out what this information is, and how to clear it / reset it.
Note the strange behavior of the surface shading below. The normals all conform at are facing the correct direction. A touch with the smooth brush fixes this, not a big deal, but having to go through and correct broken polygons every time I import the model into Zbrush gets tiresome.
Alsp note the color fill on the arms. This part of the mesh was deleted and rebuilt in maya and a new material applied. How does zbrush remember to fill this portion of the mesh when it is entirely new geometry?
