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You know what's REALLY annoying about ZBrush? -Solved, sort of...

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Create a figure in a 3D program and assign point and/or polygon groups. In my case I use Lightwave.
Load that object into ZBrush. Any version above 3.0, including ZB 4R2.
Do some sculpting on it and export it as obj and load that object back into 3D program.
All the point and polygon groups are still intact.

HOWEVER, save that figure or object in ZBrush as a ZTool, and load it back up to work on later, THEN export it as obj back to your 3D program.
Now, all the point and polygon groups have been renamed by ZBrush. :mad:

So, forget about your abdomen, your l_arm, your r_index01, no, now they’ll all have far more useful names like Group 29… Group 1… Group 46…

It’s just unbelievable that this hasn’t been addressed yet. Who in the world thought that Zbrush renaming all the polygon groups when saved as a Ztool would be a good idea?
I guess we should all just be expected to accomplish all our work in one sitting when using a figure that has poly groups. Sure, I don’t mind working 12 hours straight on the same project, knowing I’ll never be able to open it again to change anything. :rolleyes:

I guess alternatively I could just rename all my parts again in Lightwave. That should only take about an hour or so each time…

#2

Does this happen when saving as a ZProject file too? Might be worth checking out.

#3

Yes, same result with ZProject.
I’m assuming that it just basically saves it as a .ZTL within the .ZPR file format.

Thank you for the suggestion though. :slight_smile:

#4

Okay I have a workaround for this in Lightwave, which should also work for any programs that use polygon gropups and can do morphs.
If I export my model as obj with the parts all renamed and use it as a morph for the version with the correct part names, I can get my sculpted shape into the version of the model with the correct part names. Then just delete the compromised version since it’s no longer needed.

Not exactly an ideal solution, but it works and takes significantly less time than using the ZBrush object and having to rename all the part groups.
And of course it won’t work at all if the object had geometry added or was moved in 3d space along the way.

I’m going to mark this as Solved, although it’s far from being solved, but I’m going to make a thread pleading with Pixologic to change this abysmal behavior. No matter how you look at it, ZBrush renaming all an object’s parts is just bad.

#5

There’s a solution to this here under ‘Get ZBrush to keep my Group Names’ :ZBrush4R2_FAQ

#6

Okay and thank you. :slight_smile:
That works considerably better than what I wrote above.
The downside is losing any morph targets that already exist, but that’s not that big of a deal.

I did make a new thread about this, as a suggestion, but apparently they didn’t like that idea and deleted it. :rolleyes: