Sculpted high res in zbrush, really happy with it. exported the low poly model, unwrapped in uvlayout and saved the obj.
I imported the unwrapped low poly back into zbrush but it seems to have forgotten all its sculpting. I still have my high poly ztool.
Please help, how do I recombine them?
you can try the following.
load the high poly mesh.
in the subtool palette, append the low poly mesh.
subdivide the low poly mesh up to about the same number of polys as the hi poly mesh.
then in the subtool palette click “project all”…make sure the high poly mesh is visible.
play with the settings to get the best result.
that will project the detail from the high mesh onto the low mesh.
you can also transfer polypaint, if you have any, at the same time.
Thanks for the reply Zeddie. Its working but ive lost 2 days sculpt in some places where it just wont re-align.
What did I do wrong in my work process that could cause this to happen?
I seem to remember having a similar problem 2 years ago and possible something involving morph targets fixing the problem?
any suggestions greatly appreciated.
i have no clue what could have happened.
one thing you can try to get the original low poly tool, is to check your quicksave folder from light box. you may still have a copy of the document in there that has the low poly mesh from two days ago.
it’s a long shot, but it has saved me before.
What did I do wrong in my work process that could cause this to happen?
Your vertex order could have changed at some point during the export/UVing process. If no changes were made to the mesh externally, polygroups are a common culprit. I find transferring a mesh back and forth is much more predictable when I assign the mesh to a single polygroup first, or disable Tool: Export: Grp.
ZBrush should provide you with a message on import if this is the case though.
Ok I dont know how this worked but I re-imported the unwrapped obj into Max. Exported it out of max as a renamed obj, then imported that back into Zbrush and it automatically re-applied everything, it didnt even ask if i wanted to transfer high topology it just auto corrected itself.
Im really glad it’s now working, but I really dont want to run into this problem again. What part of my process is wrong:
create low poly mesh in max.
Goz and sculpt high poly in zbrush.
Goz back to max and export low poly obj. (I’m thinking was it because I didn’t export the low poly out of zbrush?)
Unwrap low poly obj in uvlayout.
What should be the next step to begin poly paint in zbrush with uvs and high poly mesh?
At step #2 you can do painting as well (you can sculpt and paint at the same time AND if inverse is selected you can do like seams in stone walls and such with alt key held down) applying a different color if desired. Must be you intend to render in Max or elsewhere…
Same problem but now I think I have made it even worse.
Ive got a character he is on 4 subtools. So I exported him as one subtool under the option in decimation master. Took him into Headus uvlayout, unwrapped great, spent ages getting him perfect. Now I cant get him back uv unwrapped into zbrush.
Please tell me the simplest way to do this really need help 
I tried taking the uv unwrapped one into max exporting just the body and then selecting the body subtool in zbrush and importing my exported body obj from mask but the option to reapply topology didn’t even come up he just went in separately with no sculpt data. surely there must be a way to get zbrush to recombine these?
Does the sculpt data even show up as anything if you Goz him into max? surely if I could see the data I could apply it to the uv unwrapped mesh somehow? Or vice versa can i goz the zbrush one into max and somehow paste the uvs onto it from the unwrapped one? (if there are any max users here)
All help greatly appreciated.
You need the vertex order to be identical, which means you can’t really split up your new mesh and expect zbrush to see it as the old one(it might look visually identical to you and me, but as far as the data goes, vertex#122 could be in very different places). So you’ll want to export your mesh from zbrush, and find a way to give that the UVs from your new unwrapped mesh. In Softimage I would use GATOR for this. Since you mentioned having 3dsMax I believe there is a Projection Modifier you can use. You may want to look into this small script http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=703656 which looks like it automates the process a bit more for you.
Once your old mesh has the UVs on it, then you can load it back into zbrush. The sculpt should automatically update, giving you all the subdivision levels/detail, along with the new UVs.
Excellent, thank you for the link I will attempt it tmrw and report back.
Phew finally resolved the issue.
Cryrid i attempted the TransUv process but it wouldn’t apply correctly. It gave it a good go but smaller parts were way out. I then attempted to reassign vertex order’s with morphix but max was having none of it. In the end It was a case of breaking up the Uv low poly pieces, appending them as subtools and using project all to rebuild the sculpt onto the uv pieces.