Hello,
I know this question was discussed here before but most of the answers (atleast the ones I ran into) where not relevant for my situation…
In my case, I have a scanned object with it’s built in texture- the mesh comes out with tries and the uv unwrap is built from several islands, in the project I’m working on thats not good enough… I need the the texture to be unwrapped in one piece and… in high resulotion.
So far I was able to unwrap in one piece by retopologing the mesh into quads and transfering the original meshs’ texture by - polypaint from texture and unwrapping with the uv master and it worked fine but- the texture was low res and pixeleted.
I’ve also managed to unwrap in one piece a mesh with tries by using the decimation master but still the texture came out pixeleted and low res.
Is the problem is polypaint from tetxture? because I’ve noticed that whenever I’m importing the scanned mesh with it’s texture it looks good and the texture is high res, but in order to unwrap it in one piece I need to retopolgies the original mesh (one way or another) and in order to get the original texture I need to use the polypaint from texture option and that mess up the whole texture.
I guess I’m missing something in the process (I did rise the uv map size ) but not sure what , or if there is something entirely different I should do…
Would appreciate any help or advice.
Thank you 
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Import scanned object
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Make polypaint from texture (subdivide the mesh before if needed (turn off smooth))
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Duplicate it
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Retopo duplicated mesh (Zremesher)
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Subdivide dup. mesh
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Unwrap dup. mesh
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Project scaned mesh on dup. mesh (including polypaint)
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Make texture from polypaint (dup. mesh)
Thank you very much @Modos for your reply.
I did try what you’ve suggested, and it’s a great way to dupliacte the texture from the scanned object to a retopo object in a fast and accurate way but unfortunately I did not get a high res enough texture… it still looks kinnda smudged…
Do you have any suggestion how to avoid it? fix it ?
I’ve noticed that even the scanned object with the original texture is losing some resolution once I press the “Polypaint From Texture” option, so when projecting it to the duplicated mesh it can not increase the resolution by itself, or can it? Is there a way to increase the resolution to the duplicted, retopo object?
It’s called “polypaint”, but it’s actually based on vertex color (ever seen what happens if you try to polypaint a low poly model?).
This means that your polypaint is going to have a grain as dense as your vertex count.
If you want more details to survive the texture-to-polypaint procedure, you must subdivide more.
Alas, I doubt you’ll be able to reach a high enough polycount before you run out of memory. You can still try, though.
Indicatively, you should have a vertex count at least as high as 3/4 of the resolution of your texture (since the unwrapped UV map doesn’t take the whole frame). For instance, if your texture is 2048x2048 (~4.2MP) your model should probably have at least 3 millions of polygons.
But I guess your texture has a much higher resolution, right? Maybe a 10k*10k?
You could try to lower the resolution of your texture before importing it in ZBrush, maybe in Photoshop, so to retain details through a dedicated function. This would also lower your requirements in terms of vertex count.
PS: ZBrush beginner, here, so take these informations with the due caution. ^^’
Transferring pixel data to vertex color data is always lossy. The reverse is also usually true.
You can help to aleviate this by ensuring your mesh is dense enough to support the detail resolution you want. Chances are you won’t be able to get your model resolution high enough to store the pixel data though. a 4k texture requires ~17 million points. If you’re trying to transfer an 8k + texture you’re looking at A minimum of ~67 million points. Trying to work at that resolution is terrible most of the time.
Your best bet is to work independent of your textures so you avoid the lose during the conversion. As you already have your new UVs and topology I would simply use another application to transfer your textures from one UV space to the other. Substance, xNormal, Maya, etc. Basically anything that can bake.
Hope that helps.
edit: you can try to see if turning off Grd in your polypaint menu helps.
Ok, step 2:
- Subdivide the mesh (turn off smooth) and make polypaint from texture
Making polypaint from texture is transferring color from 2D image (texture) pixels on 3D mesh points (vertices)…
So, you need mesh with enough points to receive color from texture pixels
Subdivide your orig. scaned mesh to high resolution level, high enough that you can’t see the difference between polypaint and texture.
You can use “Flat color” material to view texture and polypaint as it is, without aditional shadow/lighting, … info that you will get with other materials.
After that proceed with other steps…
Guys, you rock!!! thank you all for your elaborate replies! and @Modos you are a magician! it worked ! thank you