ZBrushCentral

Trying to figure out a few things...

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I use Zbrush for making objects in a platform called Secondlife. Unfortunately as it stands the custom imported meshes support for secondlife are very low poly, while they do support up to 1024x1024 textures which allows for a work around for detail levels via baking.

But more often than not a project that I want a lot of detail on requires me to combine multiple smaller mesh objects to achieve the desired results. Example, instead of doing a hand as a single sphere, I would have to break it up, do the palm, then each knuckle individually, then the fingernails as individual pieces as well.

The problems I have encountered with zBrush when trying to work like this are with the tools themselves like move and scale. I find them very counter-intuitive and overly complex for what they need to do.

I am curious if there is a way to get movement tools much like how Maya has it setup, with a bar for each axis, or scale tools in a similar fashion? Perhaps via a zscript or a UI mod?

Also, since I do have to work with so many low poly tools, it would really vastly improve my workflow to be able to have a ‘duplicate’ hotkey to ‘dupe’ the currently selected subtool. Is this a feature available in Zbrush currently or will I have to wait for GoZ to find these tools?

#2

What you describe sounds overly complicated to do zbrush. Why can’t you use a regular poly modeller where you can manage these individual parts much easier and with better control.

Richard

#3

i have to agree with richard, although transpose can be very quick if you know how to use it, for some its difficult.
wings3d and blender are both free.
to copy a zbrush model simply hit the clone button in the tool palette, then append to your current tool.

#4

Unfortunately because Secondlife doesn’t accept obj files. obj files have to first be converted into a bmp file which works sort of like a displacement map but is constricted to 64x64 size. Each pixel in this map represents a vertice placement, and depending on the color, it represents the position of said vertice. As you can imagine, when converting a high poly mesh to a 64x64 plane it loses a -lot- of detail.

Unfortunately using textures and baking them in Maya is overly complex and confuses the hell out of me. Zbrush 3.1 with zapplink is amazing for creating textures and baking lighting for this application, and it preserves a lot of the high poly details in the texture.

The issue is, the converter for Zbrush is one of the more accurate ones I have found, but it will not convert obj files created in another 3d application and then brought into zbrush. This is because the converter is specifically designed to read the topology of the zspheres which I guess are setup different than what maya creates for example. The end result is, trying to convert a obj -not- made from one of zbrush’s starting shapes like sphere3d or cube or whatever (converted to polymesh3d) at a division level of 2 or lower, it crashes.

So my needs are very specific, and unfortunately zbrush is the only program I’ve found with an accurate conversion tool with user friendly enough options for texture baking and doing high detail sculpting to add to those texture bakes.

While there are a thousand easier ways to do what I want, that pool is drastically limited by the tools provided to convert to the bmp format I need.