Hello everyone have been on this forum for not to long now. I haven’t been using Zbrush for a long time either but love it. Now my question is as follows:
When in Zbrush you are sculpting and you SubD to get more detail. Now say for example I am on SubD level 5, thats a lot of polys. Now when I export it to lightwave and then open it in Lightwave there are a hell of a lot of polygons. This does slow down the program and could cause it to crash. Now i am wondering how do you keep the SubD levels (for example SubD level 4-5) so I keep all my details and then export it into Lightwave properly. I know there will be a lot of polygons but can you help me out if I have explained my issue properly.
Thanks and Zbrush is my favorite software ever!!!
You would create a displacement or normal map to export from ZBrush. Then you’d only export the lowest subdivision level and apply the map to it so that it renders to look like the detailed model.
Check out the online documentation in my signature.
There is no real comparison between ZBrush and LW in terms of how it subdivides.
For straight subd in LW, each poly will be divided by the subd level squared, then turned into triangles. So, 1 poly at subd leve 3 will have 19 polys (332) at subdeleve 6, each poly would become 72. Obviously for using a highres displacement maps, you could be up to subd level 15 or even 20. At those levels you are talking about each poly being divided into 800 tis.
The way I would recommend is one of two ways. Look at the number of polys in ZB at your maximum level. And when you render in LW, slowly increase your subD leve until you have a similar number. Or, look into using Adaptive Sub Divisions based on either disstance to camera, detail or weight map.
Hope that helped.
thanks alot for the posts. Only thing is I am still learning, so i do not really know how to use any maps and stuff. I know thats stupid but what can I do?
Hi there.
William Vaughan did a short video about Lightwave 9.x and ZBrush discplacements map setup in the node editor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0gRkeuspU