So I am working through my first character with Z-brush and I am figuring many things out on the way. I think I have figured out my workflow for texture painting the character, but I wanted to spell it out and see if those of you who know what you are doing see any flaws or have any better ideas.
First, a little bit about my model: This character is a full-body nude character that I am striving to make photo-realistic. In 3DS Max, I broke the UVs up into 4 tile groups; one for the head, torso, arms+hands, and legs+feet. Within ZB, I used these UV groups to split the model into Polygroups and then subdivided the model up to about 3.5 Million points.
I have just learned how to use these polygroups to break the model into seperate sub-tools, which I can then further subdivide, and I plan to take each sub-tool to about 3 million in order to sculpt in details such as fingernails, toenails, wrinkles and such.
Ultimately, I want to export textures for diffuse color and normal maps. I am thinking that I will probably create the bump maps in Photoshop based on the diffuse texture. I am using Zapplink to paint the diffuse texture in Photoshop, and I have found that even with each sub-tool at around 3 Million points, that painting to texture is providing a much clearer texture than polypainting, so I am planning to do that.
The last bit is something that I have a question about…If I am painting to texture and each sub-tool will need its own texture map, how do I go about painting across the sub-tool seams and have this affect two or more texture maps?
The solution that I have in mind is to first polypaint my texture across all of the seam areas and then convert this polypainting into a texture for each sub-tool. I should then be able to pick up with this texture and continue texture painting at a higher resolution as long as I avoid these seam areas. The obvious drawback to this is that the final texture across all seam areas will be limited to the model’s PIXOL resolution, which will be less than the resolution everywhere else. This should be fine for this model, but I was wondering if there is a better way to go about this that is not so obtuse?
Thanks to anyone who has had the perseverence to get throught his post and the kindness to help. I just want to have a very solid plan before I get into texturing this model.
Cheers!
But I just wanted to ask if you had tried using HD Geometry? It could also have solved your problem in your previous thread in regards to polycount/performance for detailing. HD Geometry also supports polypainting.