ZBrushCentral

Pixologic, buy and insert Xnormal or make a similar solution please

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

The projection method in Zbrush just does not work right all the time and makes you a lot of troubles. Normal maps also are better quality being baked with raytracing method of Xnormal and do not depend on ploly count/subdivision. I am routinely using Xnormal every day but all that huge obj files (up to several gigabytes sometimes) that goes from Zbrush to Xnormal take a lot of time for export/import. Would be nice to have a similar solution right inside Zbrush.

Even an important “cage” functionality of Xnormal looks like would be quite possible with zsphers

#2

originally posted by kirkl

Pixologic, buy and insert Xnormal

:lol: Yeah! That should piss off a lot of people. :rolleyes:

#3

Not sure if Xnormal is for sale. So probably let’s keep it for all those people. They need to make something similar inside Zbrush as a replacement of their Projection buttons. Projection doesn’t work fine for multiple dense subdivided subtools, restricted in subdivision resolution, takes forever, crashes Zbrush and in several cases just can’t get a clean result.

#4

They had zMapper back in z3.1 and it did a decent job, but xNormal was still the best solution outside of using another 3D application to bake. xNormal isn’t for sale, from what I’ve read other companies have made offers but he hasn’t taken any of them. I actually don’t mind exporting out huge meshes from Zbrush, while yes, this does take a long time to either decimate or simply export it’s not that bad…and…i get to tell the boss I’m playing games since I am exporting :slight_smile:

When I was working freelance and time was money this kind of sucked though. decimation Master is 64bit now which is great and once all of Zbrush is 64bit this should really help to speed up the process. Also buying a small drive for programs that is Solid State will help a ton.

#5

Too bad decimation master messes up UV even with keep UV on. Since I use polypaint too the decimation is not an option.

Getting a good ready result form Zbrush is such a pain and takes longer sometimes then the creation process. It’s a weak part of the software. Looks like they just don’t understand all the possible problems. For example you can chose smoothed or split (hard) edges of a low poly target object while in reality games use a lot of mixed solutions, even edited vertex normals sometimes. In fact it’s just impossible to bake normal maps for a number of things in Zbrush. That’s why something like Xnormal or similar would be very welcome.

#6

You can use Decimation Master with Polypaint. Under Preferences>Decimation Master Prefs you can check off to Keep and use Polypaint with a slider on how much bias you want the polygon density to be. Since Polypaint relies on polygons it can be tricky to get a balance of decimation for sure. Sometimes you will get very tessellated areas with too much bias towards polypaint detail.

Usually what I do is save out two files. One decimated for retopo (without PP) and one full resolution (with PP) just for baking. It WILL take longer in Xnormal but the diffuse results are much cleaner.

#7

Why not give an auto unwrap to the mesh and then keep the UVs? I’ve never had a problem with keeping the UVs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYMPO_5ThKQ&feature=plcp&context=C30dc2ccUDOEgsToPDskIK30LOIb0Qrq2J4xDVi5wT
Old video showing the process.

#8

Thanks for the advice. Probably I need to try it again but I have always got a kind of low quality polypaint with this slider option, more or less depending on the weight. And with more toward polypaint it either makes a kind of extra geometry noise and hardly decimate anything. Always thought that it is pretty much useless feature. One of many similar kind in Zbrush.

For retopo I use “remesh all” since for game low poly models a precise matching of the retopo object vertexes to high poly surface not always look good and you need to do some visual remodeling in any case. All the decimate idea looks like not very good for me. How better it would be if Pixopogic do a kind of raytraced projection baker similar to what there is in most 3d packages, not only Xnormal. It’s so much more important thing than any of their announced new goodies.

#9

I am doing a lot of in-game tech models with hard edges and small mechanical parts placed by mesh insert tools. With dynamesh their modeling is only convenient with a certain, pretty subdivided dynamesh. The AUVTiles unwrap works very slow and with mistakes on such object. And then on the final decimated model I always get a kind of weird spikes and messed up small patches after the decimation with “keep UVs” button on and a cavity painted details often do not correspond with the surface any more.