Hi all, thanks for reading. It’s been many years of workflow issues surrounding hard and soft edges. vertex smoothing etc. between Maya and ZBrush
Issue 1:
ZBrush does not pay attention to vertex normals by design as it focused on subdivision to achieve “smoothness”. Using Maya’s creasing feature you are able to preserve some hard edges on import which does help when you subdivide.
HOWEVER, it is not reliable. I have often found it is a bit of a gamble if ZBrush will import the creases set in Maya. This is easily replicateable with both GoZ as well as manual FBX import/export. Try it a few times, you will see discrepancies between what you export in Maya and what ZBrush imports.
Issue 2:
ZBrush’s GoZ wipes out Maya’s vertex normals AND creasing on reimport. Although when there are major changes in the mesh, this would make sense, there are still many common use cases where loss of the vertex normals is undesired. Crafting smoothing and hard/soft edges is often a painstaking effort especially for games, so re-doing them iteratively just not reasonable.
For instance, sculpting some blendshape facial poses in ZBrush for a Maya character. The deformations are often not extreme, and the smoothing setup in Maya stays relatively the same often, with no need to adjust the normals. The same way deformations work with a rig in Maya for instance. With the GoZ process destroying the smoothed vertex normals on reimport, this workflow becomes extremely unwieldly.
My question is:
What do others do to handle this workflow and not have to repeatedly redo the smoothing work you have done in Maya?
I could potentially write a Maya python script to save the smoothing and reapply it as long as the vertex order remains the same, or modify the GoZ script. Before I dive into that, I am wondering how others handle this!
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing anyone’s thoughts on this matter.