Hey Ry,
Looks like u’re right as usual man. I had a micro poly uv overlapping within the smallest tooth of my creature. SOmething so small, I didn’t even spot when I used the " check uv " function in zbrush. I took it into maya and checked out all the UV’s manually and i spotted it.
Now… it exports at 3076 pixs! Thanks Ry, and whoever else chipped in …
See ya on msn.
Regards,
Mark Soon
is there anyone who has procedures/quickcodes for Illuminate Labs Turtle for Maya?
I noticed someone posted the same error on the first page of this thread but I dont seem to find the answer to it.
Pretty much I’m trying to make a test of exporing a Normal Map with the disp-exporter2 but it gives me an error message. What should i do? I tried re,unzipping the plug-in. Restart zbrush, restarting computer. redoing another test on a simple object, save file in new folder in case of naming issues. but still doesnt work!
just so you know… it worked 1 minute before I tried it on the sphere, thats why im so confused.
PS :o I’m kinda dumb with computers and all… By adding more ram will it make zbrush run faster with stuff over a million polys?
(pentium 4CPU, 2.4GHz, 512MB ram. heck I dont even know what kind of graphics card I have since its a hand-me-down…)
Dty5731 -
Your screen grab shows that you are at the top level of resolution. In order for a displacement map to be generated just go to a lower level of resolution. Displacement maps are done by comparing a low rez to a high rez version. 
Ryan
1st… i was wondering if Ktaylor is still planing to make a tutorial, or write up of his workflow… i know its a lot of work to do that.
I’m finally starting to get into this process, thankfully theres a guy here at work thats i can bug when im fuzzy on some areas.
2nd how r u currently transfering the data across uv groups at the shared areas? The best way i can think of is a really convoluted method using the morph brush.
Hey spaz8
Yeah im in the middle of a a bunch of stuff, the workflow I use is all up here, Ill make a tutorial soon though, currently the only way I know of to transfer that detail from one buffer zone to another it to make a displacment map for it and then mask off all the areas on the other buffer zone that you dont want it to effect, like all the edges and the other uv zone and apply that detial by applying that displacement map, this has some potential problems though so . . . .
how are you doing it with morp brush cause that sounds like a better option, I was asking around up here if anyone knew how to write a scipt that would store the vert positions of that buffer zone so that you could load up your other tool that has that same buffer zone and then apply just those verts positions over, so it would be a blend shape based solution, I havnt used the morph brush so Im not familiar with it.
Ktaylor; Well the problem with using a displacment map is you’ll get artifacting, thats why im hoping 2.5 can use the 32bit maps DE generates.
The morph brush is just a great great swiss army knife of a tool that i didnt use until a few months ago.
Basically the morph brush lets you paint locally what ever u have saved as a morph target onto your current mesh…
example… store a morph target of your model at a million polys, do some projection master work, get some artifacating, or u decide you like half or some of what u did, use the morph brush like a healing brush or eraser to go back to the origional mesh. And unlike the smooth brush it will not flatten your surface and is effective at high polycounts.
The main caveat is that polycount, and vertex numbering has to be the same on both meshes or things explode or cant work.
Ive done thinks similar to Sebecoir where ive made a composite mesh out of two very different objects modelled from the same base mesh. In theory u could make a library of parts to paint onto meshes, i was exploring that. The catch though atleast with 2gbs of ram, is that the process needs u to use an obj so the morph target in my experience is limited to under 1000K polys… more like 600K.
maybe with 4gb of ram you can write 2000K poly objs. I cant currently without a crash.
Maybe using this in combo. with. generating the displacemnt map at a pretty high level would be more effective. Or if you could keep the regions your transfer to and from to under a million polys this would be the ideal way… no degradation.
Maybe ZB 2.5 will allow you to import ZTL’s as morph target… im gonna put in a request for that tommorrow. -Ken
Yeah I hear you about the artifacts with the dismaps, I tried making the displacement map at like level 5 out of 7 hoping it would just create the high freq detial and it worked better but it still wasnt something I was comfortable with.
im secretly just hoping Zbrush 2.5 fixes all this and we wont have to cut our tools up to add more polys, from what I have heard up here it seems you can have a lot more polys per Ztool in 2.5, it sucks cause Im curently working on a character that I need to cut up to refine the different areas and I wont be able to wait for 2.5, oh well.
I see what you are saying about the morph brush ( you can store a morph target and paint what is in that morph target back onto your mesh at any time ) but I dont get how you are tranfering that data between the different tools, would you mind explaining it more??
Thanks a lot ryan! everything works perfectly now1 (boy do i feel silly lol :o )
Hey Ktaylor, ill have to get back to you and test out some of the ideas i have.
One way of using the morph brush would be breaking the model into equal (polycount) sections and then using a point re-ordering script. Say transffering the vertex count order of one object to another. Making throw away meshes just for transfering with.
I need to explore these things further. -Ken
Yeah that would be cool, hey Spaz do you have a script that does point reordering, I have been looking and cant find one, that would be REALLY useful in the whole Zbrush pipeline, I have been screwed a few times because of that
attempting to convert .tif to .map on OSX at Terminal or Command Line - all I get is:
-bash: imf_copy: command not found
any ideas?
make sure that the path tot he maua bin directory is in your %PATH%
environment variable
S
anyone has the same prob here?! i tryed to creat a 32 bit map whit MD2 but it creates nearly a 50% gray map while it works fine whit 16 bit!! and when i wanted to generate my map in ADE it just export the alpha that i selected in my alpha library.i also tryed the code that scott mentioned but not a chance:(
am i missing somting?
Well if its nearly a grey map, then Im guessing all you displacement data is there its just with a 32 bit map there are like billions of levels of grey and you cant really percieve that with the naked eye, if you go into photoshop and auto level it you will probobly see all the detail pop out, but dont save it like that!!, it should render just fine, if not could be a couple other things, like make sure you are at your L1 subdivision, sometimes I get data less maps and its because I forgot to go back to level one to generate the map, just stuff like that.
i did a quick test in maya and compared it with the 16 bit test but ther are too mutch missing in 32bit and im sure that it is at L1 subdivision. btw tif file has converted to map which shud not cause any prob.alpha gain and alpha ofset has been set to 2.2/-1.1 for 32 bit test as scott mentioned and i see nothing wrong in my workflow! any idea?
I have no idea then? At this point I would have to see the file to trouble shoot it, Im guessing its too large to email, if you want you could delete all but level 1 and 2 and that would probobly suffice for email and Ill take a look at it if you want.
by any chance do you have more than one UV shell outside the 0 to 1 range? IN the original version of the ADE (this was fixed in a recent update) I found that when I had underscores in a filename it would not increment and save the files correctly when generating multiple maps in effect resaving the files on top of each other. If I had a stray shell outside 0 to 1 with no displacement the final map would be blank (50% gray)
This has been fixed in the current version but it is a thought.
Click the Get Mesh INfo button and see how many UV shells ZBrush sees in the mesh. If it is more than you expect try and automatic map and re-generate the map.
KTAYLOR
This just came up on the Maya mailing list. It might be useful…
//QUOTE “Inside $MAYA_LOCATION/devkit/plug-ins you will find the C++ source and
header files for a plugin called “meshReorderCmd”, which according to
the documentation will “will re-index a polygon mesh based on a user defined
starting face”.
…
There is a plugin for on highend call “Reconstruct Mesh Tool” for
Maya 5 that does pretty much the same thing”
//QUOTE
S
cool thanks scott I’ll definatley check that out!!
Hello guys I am haveing some wierd problem…
I have export a displ. map with plugin , what I did is juist divide nothing spec.
In maya I did like everyone say, convert model to sub and render with MR default. And you can all see on left arm betwen hand and elbow you see some little ball on skin. On the other hand there is nothing…model is clean…so I am little bit confused…
also why I can’t make to see realy details, I even export with 4k and 32bit, sub 4, in Maya I put everything to high and can’t get very nice details 
please help