ZBrushCentral

Tool & Subtools relations and multi-tile UV mapping

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi everybody. I’m a novice so my question might be a bit stupid. I’ve made a dragon. Its head and body with limbs is all one tool. I’ve made claws,teeth,eyes and separate subtools. I plan to do manual retopology of the head,body and limbs and make one low poly mesh from it. As for teeth,eyes and claws I’ll do retopology with ZRemesher since it’s faster and easier. My questions are:

  1. when I export all of these tool and subtools into let’s say maya how should I deal with the rigging of all of these meshes since they are separate meshes? I mean, if I open and close the dragon’s mouth teeth will not follow the rotation or movement of the mouth being opened or closed,right? should it be handled by weighting and if so what type of weighting? I doubt that it could be handled by simple parent/child relation because the mouth is just part of the body and teeth are not child just to a mouth but to the whole dragon mesh.
  2. if i want to make multi-tile texture maps with multi-map exporter for dragon’s head,body and limbs is it enough just to do a scale for certain uv regions and everything that is outside of 0-1 tile will be transferred to new tiles? I mean if I want head and mouth to be on 0-1 tile should I just scale head and mouth UV region to fill the whole 0-1 tile and rest of the body and limbs would be automatically transferred to other tile or am I wrong?
    I tried to find tutorials on this matter but couldn’t find it. most tutorials refer to single tile UV Mapping.As for tools and subtools relation I can see that all the artists make body and head one tool and teeth,eyes and claws as separate subtools but not sure what they do later when they need to animate it.
#2

Mario Steiner posted this a while ago, explains how to go about setting up your model for export. >

One other thing to do is to make a normal map of your high poly sculpt before you export your low poly to Maya.

#3

hey Bangers. Thanks for the reply and for the tut image. It’s very useful as it explains a lot. But I still don’t know how to deal with my thing. Maybe I should explain further more what I meant. From what I’ve found on the internet artists mostly export from zbrush meshes as separate meshes to animation softwares like maya,3ds max etc. For instance, in my case I have dragon’s head, body,limbs as one mesh, and other subtools like teeth,eyes,claws as separate meshes. I plan on making manual retopology with Zsphere retopology tool for dragon’s body. then i plan to retopologize teeth,eyes,claws with ZRemesher since these don’t need to have precise edge loops because they will not be bent like legs or body will be. dragon’s body needs to be manually retopologized so it can be rigged and animated for walking cycles or running cycles. if I merge all subtools into one subtool with dragon’s body then it will be difficult to do manual retopology of small details like teeth… if I leave them separated subtools then when I finish separate retopology for each subtool and export them to maya or 3ds max how do I animate them as one mesh? for instance if I open or close dragon’s mouth teeth will not follow. If I make dragon’s body and teeth parent/child they will move together but when I open mouth only teeth will not follow,right? If I combine all these meshes into one mesh in Maya then UVs will be messed up again.
As for multi-tile UV mapping in zbrush…is it enough to start multi-map exporter and just scale uv regions that you want to make on 0-1 tile and other regions that are out from 0-1 tile will go automatically to other tile or am I wrong?

#4

what I meant in my previous message about multi-tile UV mapping is even though dragon’s head,body,limbs are one subtool if i wanted to have head on one UV tile and body,limbs on other do I only flatten the UVs in UV Master and scale the head to fill whole 0-1 tile and rest of the body will automatically transfer to other tile,right?

#5

Hey Zoran, I’ve not used Maya yet, I use 3ds max, but I’d say the work flow is similar.

So you have your subtools in Zbrush, say example 5 (body, eyes, teeth, scales, wings). Assuming these are all final sculpts, high sub division, you retopologise each piece separately, make sure each has a separate polygroup, then clone each of these new retopo’d subtools and merge them into 1, with the ‘merge uv’s’ button turned on.

Save as a new version here

Then go to UV master, turn on the Polygroups button and hit unwrap, and then hit flatten.

(tip, pressing ctrl z (undo) in UVMaster has a tendancy to make zbrush crash, so be aware of this, it doesn’t always happen, but it will, so try not to press undo, best to keep a save right before you use UV Master, it’s what I do, is best to save unnecessary headaches. (also, use the file save new project, since you have multi tools, important, as you’ll lose the new ones you created if you just hit save tool)

Once flattened, organise these pieces as you wish keeping them all within the boundry using rotate, scale & move (you can also use mask & hide / unhide while in UVMaster), I generally make parts I wish to have more texture detail larger, and scale down parts which I don’t. When happy with the layout, hit unflatten.

Then in subtools, clone all the high res sculpt pieces and merge these into 1. Go back to your low res pieces and go to UV Master and hit Copy UV’s, then select you high res mesh and hit paste UVs.
Now go to UV Map and select the map size you want, 4096 for great detail, or 2048, 1024 is too low unless you have a size restriction.
You should now make a normal map of you high res mesh, Normal Map > Create Normal Map

Now select your merged freshly UV’d low res sculpt and export this to .obj

For me in Max, I create a multi-sub texture and assign a texture index to each piece. Use the normal map to bring back the models details. Since it is just a single mesh now, you can rig and animate, using the select by element you can animate things like eyes in isolation.

Maybe someone with a lot experience in Maye will be able to help you more with this. I’m still relatively a noobie, but think I’ve learned a great deal so far from the great people on here and watching a billion tutorials xD

I hope this helps, and if somebody has a better method of doing this, please share, thanks :slight_smile:

#6

hey bangers,thank you for really precise reply. You cleared out a lot to me. I wasn’t sure if I would merge with UVs it would preserve UVs of each subtool. Now you told me it would so basically all these subtools would be one mesh but still they would preserve some kind of independence if you need to animate some of them separately with select by element. I thought merge with UVs is something similar as remesh which literally makes one mesh of all visible subtools. I was wrong :slight_smile: You cleared out to me that ZBrush is not able to do multi-tile UV mapping. So you need to do it either in 3ds max or maya. I was kind of hoping that I could do it in ZB but that’s not the case. thanks for clearing that out to me. I really appreciate your effort to explain everything to me. I’m self thaught and self learning is really slow and sometimes frustrating process. The only thing that keeps me going on is that I really love digital sculpting/modeling/CGI animation. that’s my hobby and not a job. but I love it and enjoy it very much…except when I can’t figure out something then it frustrates me lol. anyways, thank you buddy for all the help. I appreciate it

#7

Just keep at it Zoran, it becomes easier as you go along, Zbrush does have a kind of steep initial learning curve, but once you do the same thing a few times it will become second nature. If you have any more questions, I’ll try my best to give you a good direction.

Also, a guy who has helped me a lot, Nickz, and also has a lot of Maya tutorials on his Vimeo page here> http://vimeo.com/nickz/videos/page:1/sort:date

You should go through them, check out his tutorials relevant to your Maya needs, or Zbrush, or photoshop, he has a ton on there, all really well explained, he’s an A1 chap.

Good luck mate :+1:

#8

Thank you so much for the kindness,help and encouragement. It means a lot. I can’t describe enough how thankful I am for all the help and effort. With even just 1 reply you saved me from weeks long internet search for answers. I already bookmarked the link to Nick’s videos for Maya and ZBrush. Thank you thank you thank you :slight_smile:

#9

Thanks Zoran ;), I’m more than happy to help when I can. Send me a pm if there is anything else you need to know, and good luck with your dragon project, cheers