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Trouble with importing 29million OBJ

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello everyone. I’m new to Zbrush. Got tired with Mudbox and all the artifacting on displacement map exports.

I’m trying to import a 29million poly .obj into Zbrush 4. I keeps getting an error “Error ecountered while importing a file”… I also tried importing the same geometry as a .MA file and it says an other error “missing xyz vertex data”. Followed the instruction on the Zbrush wiki saying to delete history in Maya before saving the MA file. I also tried using GoZ for the same model and it said the same error “missing xyz vertex data”. The obj is just one character and has multi tile UV cordinates. I can import an 8 million poly version of the same character but I need to 29 million version. It’s an exported obj from Mudbox 2010. What am I missing? What do i need to do?

#2

hey 3dman, first off how much ram do you have in your computer? Also, you should not try to load a 29 million poly mesh. If this file is from mudbox can you subdivide down at all? I’m running 6 gigs and I can push just over 30 million with my machine, but even that takes a long time to process. Try subdividing down in mudbox, if you cannot I think maya has the ability to do a poly crunch, do that and then you may have to retopo the mesh.

#3

I’m running on 16 Gigs of RAM and a Hex core CPU. My computer is fairly powerful. I was hoping on importing the model as is because it has all my detail. I was then planning to Reconstruct subdavisions back to 28K polys (the source), and then export displacement maps for each UV tile. Is Zbrush 4 capable of importing a 29 million poly OBJ file? When this model is loaded into Maya it only takes up about 6 GIGs of ram. But I would like to keep from reducing the amount of geometric detail as that is all the good stuff I want to keep until after I have my displacement maps.

#4

I was hoping on getting information on the errors that I keep getting. What could cause these errors and how to avoid them?

#5

The main problem is that zbrush is a 32bit program and therefore can only access at most 4gigs of ram. Generally if you were going to work with a model with that many polys in zbrush you would probably use the HD geometry feature or split the model up into separate subtools and recombine them later.

However, you may be able to load the model as is, but you will need to go into preferences -> mem -> and raise the max poly per mesh so that it is slightly higher than your current poly count (by default with at least 4gigs of ram this should be at 21.8mil polys). You should also adjust the compact memory slider so that it is set to 4096, this way it will allow zbrush access to all 4 gigs of ram.

After that try importing your model. Hopefully that should work, but importing that many polys at once may cause zbrush to run out of memory and crash.

#6

Why do you need 29 miljon poly’s ?

you know the saying less is more?

I have a pretty fast computer and when I switch to level 6 ( 2/3 miljon) I have quite some waiting time if I try to mask stuff

#7

Hey, thanks for the reply, nstine. I the mem settings and it still didn’t import. Anyone else have any theories?

#8

You could try cutting up your model into smaller chunks and export that way.

To assemble it all together you could try either of the 2 ways I can think of: 1)projecting them (chunks) onto a unified mesh (level1 mesh) to restore detail/subd levels; 2)possibly merge verts and try to reconstruct subd afterwards (not sure if that would work)

Edit: I thought you could also use remesh function, but I just checked what it does, and it won’t work here.

Hope this helps.