ZBrushCentral

Need some help; trying to figure out a solution to an issue with high vs low poly.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey all,

I’ve been working on this tank on and off for the last 2 years, I hardly work on it, but since zbrush has evolved I’ve been trying to figure out how to finish this thing. I’ll outline everything below and then post what I’m trying to accomplish at this point in time:

So I have this model I made in Maya, and imported to ZBrush. It’s a tank, and it has a little over 60 subtools because of the complexity of the tank. Most of the subtools are between 3-22 mil polys. I added almost all the details I want on it thus far, but where I’m running into an issue is being able to figure out how I will eventually export it all out as 1 mesh so I can use Xnormal to convert all the maps from the high poly to the low poly version.

Here’s a link to view the tank incase anyone needs to see it for a better understanding:

www.facebook.com/msobyak

I used decimation master to get all the subtools down enough to get 2 screenshots of all the details, but I can’t texture it with the low poly count because it doesn’t have enough polys for the details. I tried to export it into mudbox, but the mesh didn’t convert very well.

I don’t mind texturing it before i decimate it, but I couldn’t figure out a way to keep the quality of the texture if I decimate it after texturing it. I want to stay away from having to export every piece, xnormal each one, and then re-compile them all at the end as that would take forever.

If anyone has any ideas on how I could go about this I would be grateful.

Thanks!

#2

XNormal lets you bake with several high and low poly meshes at once. No need to recompile them afterwards, so its a quick process. You can also use it to bake polypaint from the obj, and have decimation master set up to preserve polypaint under Preferences.

#3

Ah, I tried to preserve the polypaint in the preferences, but that didn’t work too well. The mesh got all messed up and so did the paint. Is there any way to export all the subtools at one time? I guess I could use XNormal to bake all the meshes at the same time, but exporting them all would take a while.

So in XNormal, if I have 1 low poly mesh, and all my ZBrush subtools are exported out (about 60 of them) then I can use all those and bake it into the 1 low poly mesh at one time and it will put it all on 1 normal map, 1 diffuse map?

If so, that wouldn’t be too bad over all.

Thanks!

#4

What result are you getting with Decimation Master + Polypaint?

So in XNormal, if I have 1 low poly mesh, and all my ZBrush subtools are exported out (about 60 of them) then I can use all those and bake it into the 1 low poly mesh at one time and it will put it all on 1 normal map, 1 diffuse map?

Yup. It’s a good time saver. As for exporting, Subtool Master has an export option that should export every subtool.

#5

The mesh ended up looking like a height map with a bunch of spikes, and all the paint was messed up over all.

If that’s the case then I could just export the low poly version from Maya which would have all 60 parts in 1 mesh, and then use the subtool master to export all the subtools out; put them all in XNormal, bake them onto the one Maya mesh, and then have the 1 diffuse and 1 normal map I’m looking for… that would give the result I’m looking for… ultimately.

I’ve used XNormal before, just not with a complex piece like this. Trying to save myself some time with trial and error since I spent a ton of time trying to do that already. That and I want to have the best results I possibly can.

Thanks!