ZBrushCentral

Re-arraging GUVtiles

Hello all; I’m having the next situation… I need to re arrange the GUVtiles for a mesh, it will be exported to the source engine, I’ve already taken care of the normals and the model geometry, the thing is. I’m having problems with the diffuse map… I want to re-arrange the map so it can be photoshop editable, I’ve already tried with the render to texture feature in 3D Studio Max, but that doesn’t solved anything.

Does anyone have a tip to share? And yes, I’ve lost the original UV, I only have the GUVtiles. :frowning:

Ok! Managed to get back my old UVs, but the main problem now is that Zbrush seems to stretch them too much; any tips for this?

The first pic is the main polypaint (colorize mode, no texture) and the second one is the model after clicking the Col>txr

Thxs!

Attachments

Untitled-1.jpg

Untitled-2.jpg

Re-arranging GUV tiles would be tedious and unfulfilling to say the least. GUV tiles, AUV tiles, and PUVtiles are, by their nature computer readable, but not really useful for post-editing in Photoshop or other image editing programs. Their advantage is that they are more efficient that some other methods such as “pelting” (the idea of "pealing out a mesh and laying it flat) and “projecting” which suffers from issues where the shape doesn’t match the projection type.

PUV tiles (short for Packed-UV tiles) will likely give you a somewhat optimal use of UV space with very little distortion. So, if you do not need to edit in Photoshop after the fact, you might go with this.

If you definitely need to do Photoshop, you will want to consider a pelting method for your UVs. Since you mention distortion, it sounds like the pelt (e.g. the flattened image of your model unwrapped) is probably stretched or distorted in spots. A couple of things can help.

First, use smoothed UVs. You will see “SUV” on your geometry pallet. This should be turned on. Right now, if you use SUVs, it must be used before your last divide of your object and you must NOT go back up a level. You will loose the smoothing if you step back a level. So do your last divide just before polypainting and do NOT step back up a level. (I will often paint on a clone of my model and hit “delete lower” to get rid of the lower levels to keep myself from accidentally going back up a level when creating my texture maps.)

If you want to make your own pelted UVs, you will need tools outside of Zbrush to do this. One of the best is UVLayout: http://www.uvlayout.com/ It is slightly pricey, but is widely regarded as the best of these kind of the tools. They hobbyist version is powerful enough for most users, but UV pros will appreciate features only found in the professional versions. Other polygon editors have UV editors included. These are tools like Modo and Silo. (I personally use Modo quite a bit for UV editing.) Another specialty tool is UVMapper Pro–it has features useful to Poser/DAZ modellers, but is not as powerful as UVlayout.

-K

Problem is, it’s already pelted. I’ve try with SUV, same problem… I tried the render to texture in 3D Studio Max, Do you know if there is a way in 3D Max to use pelted UVs of one model as a projector for the GUVtiles of Zbrush? Similar to the Normal Mapping technique, but only with the texture?

I don’t, but maybe one of 3DS experts around here knows a trick. GUV tiles and Pelted UVs are rather different techniques. The only thing I can think of maybe to boost the map resolution if you’re seeing too much distortion.

-K