Trouble attempting to assign PUV Tiles

[system]

Hi, sorry about asking this, I’m sure this has been asked 379.000 times lol, but I’ve looked around for tutorials on creating UV maps in Zbrush and exporting for other Apps… and I don’t know why it’s not so easy to find as all other subjects…

I’m kind of new to UV mapping, I know how it works in theory but I don’t know much about the details (PUV Tiles, GUVs etc…), neither have I ever created or manipulated a UV mapped texture… I have the notion that PUV tiles are a faster method and it’s best for use within Zbrush… but I noticed it creates a weird tile setup that I’m not sure if other applications might read well… (unless there’s some mapping method i don’t know about)

I just want to be able to export what I paint on my Zbrush model to use it on the exported .OBJ file, by what I’ve tried out so far, painting textures directly on the Zbrush model is way more comfortable than texturing in other programs.

So anyway, I have a model of a japanese mask I finished modeling, I want to render it in VUE along with other stuff in the scene…

It’s about 900,000 polygons in 1 single merged tool (I can lower it to 60,000 with decimation master BUT I loose what I painted on with Polypaint if I decimate it, I’ll have to lower it either way cause VUE has trouble handling large poly models, but I’ll get to that part of decimation master once I learn how to create UV maps and export textures first) (But if anyone wants to explain that part too it would be great)

Anyway, down to the problem:

I set up my document size to 1024 x 1024 (read somewhere it’s one of the first steps, the doc size must match the texture size)

I move on to the UV mapping panel where I set up my UV map size to 1024 (to match the doc size)

I try to assign PUVs and it says I have to raise my UV map size or lower my UV Map border

I lower the map border even to zero and it keeps saying the same thing… so I guess I have to raise the map size… I raise the map size and it only seems to work with a really big map size like around 4096,

My problem is, as soon as I click on PUV Tiles (having slided up to 4096), Zbrush freezes… I assume it’s undergoing some process and I have to wait (since that sometimes happen when it displays my model preview in the material selection window), but I waited around 10 minutes and nothing… still frozen…

Is a 900,000 poly model way too heavy for this task?

I’m on a relatively old comp… around 1.4 GHz and 1Gb of RAM (I have to upgrade ASAP but I haven’t had trouble with zbrush at all in that matter)

Thanks

[Kerwin]

What is your lowest level of your model? 900K polys is a little large for a lowest level. Can you use reconstuct Subdiv (Geometry tab of Tool Pallet) to get to a lower level while keeping your higher levels. (UVs are initially calculated on the lowest level.)

If you can’t use Reconstuct Subdiv, you might try simplifying your base mesh (lowest level) by using decimation master, topology tools, or zspheres to get to something lower and then project (Project All on the Subtool pallet) your mesh onto that lower resolution base mesh.

In a couple of quick tests, a 900K poly base mesh is simply too heavy for AUV and PUV algorithms. At 900K, you’d be better off with a model of about 5-7 levels, with the base mesh in the range 1500-15,000 polygons.

HTH,
-K

[system]

Hi, thanks for the reply, sorry I couldn’t reply earlier.

Yea… I deleted the lower levels after I was ok with the main shape thinking it would help zbrush to work faster… So it won’t let me reconstruct (on a side note, I cheked the mesh integrity and it says about 5000 polys are being shared with 1 edge, or something like that… I think that happened when I blended in some ears I cut out from demohead… I wanted to save time with those…

I just decimated it and changed my subject, so now I’m using it as part of a tree so they share the same material and that’s it… no more complications with that model… lol

I’ll just chill with this mask model I was making now that I know I should keep the lowest level possible for texturing later on, since the topology is already ruined… At least the picture composition isn’t looking bad at all as part of a crazy surrealist tree with masks in it…

I’ve got 2 questions though…

What is the best UV mapping method for using in external programs like… say Max, Vue, etc… I noticed PUV tiles doesn’t make a mesh map on the bitmap like the usual bitmap you see with all the polygons layed out flat, from what I noticed PUV tiles seems to be a method only Zbrush would understand… am I wrong there?

And the other one, is there a way to have what I paint on the model, (the polypaint which would become the texture) blend in some way with the material I choose? Like to have the resulting exported texture blend with the tones of the cavities the material produces in Zbrush and stuff? I feel that isn’t possible by what I’ve observed, but just in case it could be done in some way, it would be awesome…

Thanks again

[Kerwin]

PUV tiles is like cutting up the entire mesh, polygon-by-polygon and then just laying them out flat like jigsaw puzzle pieces in UV space. They are scaled and packed in a way that tries the optimize the square UV space. This reduces the kind of stretching and pulling you get when you do a traditional skinning UV map where you cut up the “pelt” and lay it flat (somewhat distorting the shapes to get them to lie flat.) If you don’t have to hand paint your UV maps later in an image editor (like Photoshop), PUV tiles will give you a pretty faithful representation of your polypainting which should read just fine in other programs–it just won’t make visible sense for the human eye because everything is jumbled up in “machine” form.

The shift-key when painting lets you blend painting within ZB.

To blend multiple textures together at render time, different rending programs have different ways of “stacking” multiple texture map (such as a color and dirt map). These kinds of maps are usually prepared by the artist separately and then combined by the render at render-time.

-K

[system]

Got ya.

Thanks a lot!