ZBrushCentral

Smoothing on OBJ import into non-modeling programs

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I am exporting a low-poly model with creased edges as an OBJ. When I import it into Maya or Blender, it’s fine - looks exactly the same as in ZBrush. However, when I import it into Unity or Mari or 3D Coat, it gets all messed up. It’s completely smoothed, even along the creased edges, and the normals get all discolored. When I export the model as OBJ and I include the polygroups, everything is fine in Unity (that’s the program I am most concerned about), but there are a million and one sub-groups/materials that is unmanageable for my programmer. There are no textures on it yet, we were just seeing how the normals looked in Unity. This has never happened to me before and it is utterly confusing. However, it is happening with other models as well, now. Is there an option I activated/deactivated that has changed everything? What am I missing here?

Also, I tried making the entire model one polygroup to see if that helped anything, but it didn’t.
I tried un-creasing everything, same thing.
I tried importing it into Maya/Blender and then exporting from there and then importing into Unity/Mari/3D Coat… same thing.

I’m stumped.

PS. All the models I’m having an issue with are hard-surface models and were made with the ZModeler, just fyi, if that makes a difference.

#2

The problem is that creasing is a set of instructions to the rendering engine. Some programs support the same format that ZBrush uses and some do not. This is why it’s working fine for Blender and Maya but not working right with other programs.

If you will be exporting to a program that does not support creases, you will need to use edge loops instead. That gives the same result, albeit by adding more polygons.

#3

Ohhh, thank you very much for your help! Much appreciated! :slight_smile:

#4

Try the FBX plugin to export from ZBrush. The file format includes a bit more than OBJ and it might solve your problems, in Unity perhaps.