ZBrushCentral

Second Life & ZBrush Mesh Problems, ANSWERS NEEDED D:

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello, i am pretty new to Zbrush but i am managing to make
some decent designs now, i am wondering if anybody knows of any
good tutorials with decent step by step info on how to make a
Second Life mesh using Zbrush that would require making Polygroups
and using the UV Master plugin. I have been searching all around
the web trying to find info on this subject but i am only getting
minor pieces but not the whole story.

I have been trying to self teach myself on Zbrush and am

happy with my progress but the whole reason i am using Zbrush is
to design things for Second Life using Meshes and i can never seem
to get anything right for it. I Understand a single mesh upload
for Second Life only supports 8 Polygroups at a time. But i am
having trouble knowing how and where to properly place them
Polygroups, and UV Master i am completely lost in just like the
Polygroups when i try to Unwrap things it either adds more
Polygroups then i want, or it does work but the UV Map looks
nothing like it should… like things are scattered off the UV
Map entirely or the whole UV Map looks like a solid Image when i
Flatten it. Then when it comes to texturing… can you even
paint with the ZBrush Materials for Second Life?. When i am making
things i am using Multiple Sub tools, do i use UV master on each
subtool or do i use it when i Merge them all together after i
texture them?. I already understand how to use Lightbox for
texturing so i don’t think there is anything wrong with the way i
am using that.

Pretty much the info i need help figuring out is how do you

use UV Master, How to properly place your polygroups, and the
options of texturing your mesh all for Second Life. If anybody may
even know what i am doing wrong atm and could help me out tell me
what i need to do to correct my mistakes it would be much
appreciated. Pretty soon i am not gonna have any hair left to pull
out from my head after all this frustration lol. OHH and one more
thing, Can you make things using Shadowbox while making your
mesh’s for Second Life?.

Thank you to anybody in advance who replies to this thread with any useful information.

If i am able to figure this all out and make nice Mesh designs for Second Life using Only ZBrush i will
like to do my best to make a in depth tutorial on how to do so for anybody else who may require
the help i did. :smiley: And i would like to post it here in ZBrush Central.

#2

I Used to be in SL and I have gotten a few thing to show up there as mesh, actually in Opensim but that not the point.
It is actualy easy, there is a plugin for Zbrush.
Look here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?93650-Second-Life-Sculpties-in-ZBrush-4-ZSculpty-Tools

Part of it makes sculpties, the other part (same pallet) makes .dae files.

Good luck and if you need more help let me know, I have a few other things some place that might be useful

Oh, be careful of size, LL is after your money and will count every single polygon and bill you for each one.

Cheers!
Mealea

#3

If you are impatient to bring something into SL that you made in Zbrush then Decimation Master is your friend.

Make your shadow box shape and process it thru Decimation until it’s as low a polycount as you can get it without losing important detail.

Use the sculpty maker mesh export features to export your model as a dae file with lods.

#4

^,.,^ Yeah i was planing to play with that plugin sometime, :stuck_out_tongue: think most of my problem is i need a lot more practice. For SL Mesh’s you don’t really need to initialize anything right? I think thats mostly just for Sculpted Prims? :eek:. o,.,O And would you possibly know how to properly polygroup a creation that has multiple Subtools? x,.,x I feel like i am being a pain in the ass but i don’t really have any options on who to ask lol.

#5

You are NOT being a pain in the ass! Not to worry!
GRIN!!!

The SculptyMaker plugin has a mesh exporter built into it and it works well.

With multiple subtools you should be able to select the first one and then hit “Merge Down” in the Subtool Pallet till they are all one tool.
Then, as Nancyan said, use DecimationMaster to reduce polycount. Iif you are like me this last bit is not a joke, LL will get you, so reduce polycount till you are seriously concerned about quality.

You can test anything you like for free if you go to OsGrid (the largest Opensim grid).
Go to Sandbox Plaza and try things there, your viewer, (such as it is) will tell you what LL would have charged but since you are not in SL you wont be charged at all. This way you can see what you have and make adjustments as needed. LL or some 3rd party may have implemented “temp” mesh uploads in which case ignore the next bit.

Building anything that requires uploads is not advisable in SL, do everything in Opensim first and when you are satisfied then upload to SL. If you dont know what Opensim is I can explain that further but suffice to say my laptop can handle 25 regions all linked together into one 5x5 grid with no “sim borders” my prim limit for each of these regions is set at 180,000 and the size limit is set at 1024 (so is my draw distance). And its free.

Cheers!
Mealea

#6

MeaLeaYing, I may hit you up some time soon in a private message for an explanation of how to access OpenSim. I may be too technically challenged for it, but I’ve been curious.

Nathanial, “initialize” is to set the sculpty map to your preferred dimension - square or a variation of oblong.

I encourage you to really learn to use Blender or another 3d package along with Zbrush and learn about UVs and how to make them yourself. After that you can rely on “helper” programs, but they don’t always give you what you want and you should be able to recognize and fix them.

Lately I’ve been making my base model in Blender and use Blender to set up my UVs and make material groups. I import the mesh as an .obj into Zbrush to sculpt in finer detail to project into the texture. The base mesh is low poly enough to support the structure relying on the texture (and ambient occlusion, etc.) to trick out the finer details. Otherwise the cost both for uploading and prim usage-wise is too prohibitive.

I’m not really understanding your polygroup question. I also don’t remember if polygroups work like material groups via the collada export script. I seem to remember they do, and If I’m correct about this then the following might be helpful:

  1. select each subtool in turn and in the polygroup menu hit “group visible” to make each a unique polygroup.
  2. from the subtool menu hit “merge visible” and select the merged result from your tools palette - all polygroups should remain intact.
  3. In the Zplug in Palette > UV Master make sure you turn on “Polygroups” to create UV islands based on your polygroups.

When after exporting from Zbrush as a collada file and importing into SL, you will now be able to texture your subtools individually based on your UV islands/material groups and swap out textures for these areas.

#7

:stuck_out_tongue: It has been WEEKS!! since i could find any proper help and you two have been great =] i will take both of your advice and do my best to put it to use and let you know if i get the results i have been looking for all this time :). And for Polygroups Nancy i just did not know if i was supposed to split up a single subtool or something if it had some complicated areas inside of it in order for the UV master or something to help unfold/flatten it right or something is all. Once again thank you both you have helped me more then anybody has in a long time. :smiley: I hope to be able to return the favor some day aswell.

#8

Nice post, this has also helped me a lot. As I am also trying to build a full avatar eventually and upload into SL. It’s definitely a lot of work I am learning lol.

#9

It’s a complicated endeavor for a novice to 3d (or an advanced beginner such as myself). Especially with uploading an avatar…there’s all kinds of “specialties” that in industry are farmed out to such specialists: Concept creation, modeling, rigging and animation, texturing/material-izing (material-izing is a professional word I just made up :rolleyes:) etc, etc. So as novices to 3d we are trying to accomplish the almost impossible on top of mesh being a newly introduced creation feature to SL with all the inevitable bugs.

Folks with a fair amount of expertise are busy as bees working on their projects and not in a position to “teach” as yet. The whole process is extremely tedious and time consuming and results are not instantaneous. And even after you make your model, it takes time on the beta grid uploading and testing again an again.

There are tons and tons of free tutorials on the web. I’m self-taught and I understand how frustruating it all can be with the information overload and bizarre terminology, but I picked up bits and pieces along the way and asked specific questions about stuff on the forums, and I eventually added some books to my library and bought some high quality training from a variety of sources all listed on the Pixologic website. What I learned is the process itself hard work but alot of fun and I’m encouraged by the many small rewards of learning new techniques even if a decent final outcome is far out in the horizon.

That being said, be sure to also follow the Mesh forums on the sl website. You can even ask Zbrush specific questions there as well since many SL creators use Zbrush.

#10

As I understand the basic SL avatar its basically a poser2 model with the same rig, IE all body parts are named the same and thus can use poser2 and up (sort of) .BVH files.
This is where that gets interesting, in theory if you make a .BVH file based on the SL Avatar and run it on a model with the same body part names it SHOULD just work.
Blender has a ton of stuff for Sl including the ability to use rigs for the same .obj files SL is using.
Mesh is not new to the SL viewer, it was working just fine in RealXtend in 2008 and the lindens have made a hash of it, they made it complex and they made it hard, not for your benefit, for theirs. If it were for your benefit as the creator(s) of THEIR world it would be things like .obj files just like the rest of the world, but no.
So Use Zbrush to create and design your models, you can make your textures in Zbrush too.
UV’s will be something you will need when you send it all over to Blender for rigging, and that should not be as hard as it sounds, but I will get to that next.
If you make a human or standard biped you SHOULD be able to name all your body parts and use the standard SL rig and all the associated .BVH animations SHOULD work. (this is a wildly optimistic statement)
However if you make something different you will need to rig and make your own animations.
Ok, here is the neat thing, you can download the .obj male and female avatars, texture templates and clothing templates for free as a starting point, there are blender sites and tutorials for this, I forget where but this is again a question that would be better asked in OsGrid, people there have a MUCH greater desire to share knowledge then people in SL who want to keep all their secrets to them selves so they can exploit other users.
LL released mesh from closed beta and OsGrid had it working BETTER the NEXT MORNING, these people are not stupid.

So that leads me to this:

Getting into Opensim, specifically Osgrid

Download the Imprudence viewer, 1.4.0 beta#2 is the best for the PC at the moment (last I looked) Mac I’m not sure, I haven’t got one.
Once you have that go to www.Osgrid.Org and make an account.
Then run the Imprudence viewer, set your grid selection popdown menu to OsGrid do the normal login names and password stuff and poof, you are in a whole new world, one with no limits or economy or tyrannical overloads.
The Imprudence viewer does not yet suppport mesh as LL desided to do some fairly hidious things to the licencing, meaning they screwed with the intent of GPL somehow. However any viewer that can connect to SL can connnect to Opensim grids so it doesn’t matter, Imprudence is just the most stable thing going.

If you want to seriously make things in SL with any amount of uploading do it in OsGrid first, its limitless and free and if it works there it will work in SL (scripting is the exception, Opensim has 6 -8 different scripting languages and LSL is somewhat different as are physics)
Running your own simulator or your own gred or even what I have, a 25 region megaregion (This is on a laptop and each region is the equivillent of 6 full SL regions (sims)) is just a mater of downloading your own server, configuring it and your router (not always easy, Im on cellular and while its fast as heck I still cannot connect my grid to OsGrid and even if I could it would be insanely expensive, bandwidth for me is not a joke).

Personally I have given up on these worlds for the most part, I want to see them done differently and with an aim of 100% freedom, non hardware/OS dependent and totally interconnected (something called Interop).
LL is fighting all that tooth and nail and it will bite them in the end I hope.
Having 25 sims with no sim borders and a forest of well over 100,000 plants, trees, beastys (artificial life) and all sorts of other stuff running on my laptop was what looked to me to be the beginning of a heck of a future but they fought back and used mesh as a wedge and created an appalling viewer to go with it.

Ok end of tirade.

#11

:eek:I am getting a bit jaded with these worlds myself. My single interest at this point is just the creative possibilities and its alot of fun to “wear” one’s own model in a game environment and discuss things with other creators I run into, helping people along the way. But it hasn’t been particularly fun or relaxing for a long while. Lots of folks are upset with the way things are run, but are never in agreement with each other. It gets tiresome. Initally it was a lot of silly and relaxing fun.

Poser has a bone structure of I believe 16 bones, and the SL avatar rig has 26 named bones. I know very little about animating and rigging, but I’m fairly certain to upload a rigged model successfully into SL you need to use the SL avatar rig and the correct naming convention for the 26 bones. This is available as a .blend file. I’ve uploaded a number of rigged avatars from blender without much difficulty. And I should also mention that at this time you cannot upload any other type of rig, such as one designed with additional bones, so rigging a quadraped is an exercise in complete frustration. It needs to conform to the SL avatar biped set up and the arms just go all wonky. It’s pretty impossible to weight them and get them to conform to animal movements. Very frustrating, believe me.

For Poser (which I’ve used for making small animations for SL), someone provided an SL model converted to be used in Poser for making BVH files (and there’s a model native to Poser you can also use), but I do not believe that is in anyway useful to bring a rigged avatar into SL. Animating it after it’s in SL, yes. After you’ve successfully brought a rigged avatar into SL it conforms to the standard SL animations and you can add poser animations you create.

Thanks for the lesson in setting up in OpenSim. I’ll check it out, and I realize now I will also have to decide if I’m likewise getting tired of these virtual worlds and wait and see how I feel after he dust settles before committing too much time to the project. Tempting though to have “miles” to create with.

#12

hehehehehe…
If I remember correctly a mile (roughly) would be a little over 14 regions long, so one sq. mile would be about 196 regions total, that a lot…
I can do a mile long, on my laptop with and as a megaregion I would have no sim (region) borders.

Now for something even more fun 5 miles!
Thats 31.4 regions long 985 regions, and THAT is vast! 31-32 regions is a lot, but I could still do but only as a long strip, I just dont have the ram for 985…
Also to make it a nice round number 32x32 a little over 5x5 miles would be 1024 regions and THAT would be enough to make one small sized mountain, a reasonable town, or even a small but high city, Manhattan for example is about two miles wide and about thirteen miles long, so a little bigger but whose quibbling right?
Wait… thats slightly LARGER isint it?
Suddenly I feel blond as heck…

Anyhow I’m sorry about the tirade, I get mad at LL and go off a bit at times.

Don’t let my ideas and attitudes prevent you from making stuff, just remember its not yours, its theirs.

#13

im interested in this too Mealea, and hope to try it out soon, but! im curious on this bit that LL will bill me for polygons?

that’s scary! :o

#14

LL bills for any upload, sometimes they are reasonable sometimes they get you good.
In the upload process in most if not all mesh viewers it will (or should) tell you what each model you upload will cost.
THAT keeps you from being shocked.
Some viewers allow you to do whats called a temp upload (I’m not sure if this applies to mesh as I’m not doing anything with it at the moment) and that makes it possible to see it in world for a little while to see if its what you want (again I’m not sure about mesh here, I do know that images were or are like that)
What I do though is build everything in Opensim do all my uploads, textures, sculpt maps and mesh, and that allows me to see everything inworld for as long as I want and if I want to I dont even have to be online as I can run a sim locally. Very handy (and fast!)
Dont let my thoughts on LL detract from making things, and just keep an eye on what you get charged.

Cheers!
Mealea

----EDIT: One other thing about mesh, a lot of people cannot see it, so what you make will be invisible (or mangled) to a large percent of the population. I dont know what that percent is but its not small.

#15

Ahh!! well i do know of the 10L upload for most things like textures and animations/poses, but i didnt think it would be higher than the “norm” for the sculpts/mesh.

phoenix and firestorm both let you do a temp upload, so that is a great thing! and yes will keep an eye on the costs, thanks a ton for saying something, i really do appreciate that Mealea…

im new to all of this and have been reading and watching a ton of tuts for the last few weeks… its time i got my fingers moving tho and try a few things out myself. its good to see there are people here that are a bit familar with SL and i hope we can get some more tuts on a few things. right now cant think of anything, but i hope i post in the right spot when i do!

please keep an eye out on me, im a bit spazzy sometimes :stuck_out_tongue:

nice to meet you too!! :stuck_out_tongue:

#16

I found some form of sl avvy in a .ztl file, forgot where i got it from, and i read up on how to put it into the “tools”?? folder.

will crank up zbrush tonight, and if i have any issues will keep up with this thread.

I am wanting to do skins shapes textures clothing and more, and it’d be best to keep all info here so others can find it.

in a way, im glad they did bring mesh to the grid, but i do stay out of the politics of it. design is what makes me happy and even tho im jsut starting out, i pick things up i like rather easy… but keep fingers crossed!!

#17

Just to correct a misunderstanding. A sculpt map is just a texture which represents a set number of vertices and fixed lods so it remains 10 lindens to upload.

Mesh is a dae file upload and is a complex combination of lod options, physics shape, unique material grouping, unique uv set and optionally textures. Therefore the pricing is not straight forward and is most likely skewed in the direction of encouraging efficent modeling and use of reasonable lods, etc.