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zbrush to 3dsmax: turbosmooth trouble

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

hi to all. sorry for my english first (not native language).

i have a trouble. :frowning:

in many tutorials about exporting zbrush models and displacement maps into 3dsmax, there is always a step about applying “turbosmooth” modifer. but turbosmooth affects sharp edges like ears and tooths - they are smoothed too!

i mean if you apply turbosmooth on cube - it will be a sphere at 3rd iteration! but i need a cube!

hope you understand my question. if not, i will post some screenshots here.

thank to everyone for help!

#2

Hard edges in 3DS Max with Sub-D’s (Turbo and Meshsmooth) can be accomplished in one of two ways. The best way is to do this with close adjacent edges (or edgeloops). Turbosmooth pulls to the center point of a face, not the edges. By having close edges, you create a tiny face and thereby, you control where smooth mesh gets pulled to creating your crease. The other option is to set creasing on edges in Editable Poly, Meshsmooth, etc. This has the advantage of not making you add more geometry to your mesh, but it is not standardized outside of Max. So moving your model between Max and Zbrush will be problematic if you use this method. Going from Zbrush back into Max, you need to construct a topology that reflects this fact of smoothing. If you have a crease in your sculpt, you will need to build a pair of loops describing the crease so that when you export it, Max’s smoothing modifiers will maintain the crease. If you are familiar with ZBrush’s edgeloop tools, then you can use it ((See: Edgeloop Modeling Controls)) to create the double loop using the crisp function and or you can use topology and add the loops there.

For a quick overview of how to use adjacent edges to control smoothing you can check out this video . It doesn’t just deal with that, being more of an overview of sub-d modeling pitfalls, but it does have some very clear examples of the technique I’ve mentioned in it. Good luck!

#3

nimajneb, thank you a lot! your detailed answer, that video and that guerilla site is awesome :+1: thank you again! :slight_smile:

so, now i undertand how it work and i use it

but! i have discover one strange thing:

Untitled-4.jpg

looks like zbrush smooth subdiv algorithm is not the same as in 3dmax turbosmooth

so, there is can be problems, like if i wanna to sculpt landscape at plane, i get artifacts at edges/corners

can anyone tell me, what is wrong?

#4

Nothing is wrong, persay. You’re just bumping into the different way the two applications deal with smoothing an open surface, like your plane. But you can make Zbrush act like Max in this case by doing the following…

smooth_off.jpg

Uncheck that little box marked with the red arrow before you divide your plane and I think you will get what you want.

#5

okay, these two applications do smoothing of open surfaces by different ways, (looks like it is not standardized).

so, in cases when mesh is not open - max turbosmooth and zbrush smooth subdivide are always gives 100% equal result on same mesh, right?

#6

I’ll never say 100% of the time to anything :smiley: Treatment of non-quad faces (pentagons, hexagons, etc.) might offer some differences because they’re going to be converted to tri’s and quads on import, if I understand things correctly. That may have changed but that special case set aside, it’s been my experience that a smoothed closed surface in Zbrush is much the same as in Max, yes.

#7

well, anyway, there is a trouble, because 3ds max and zbrush do mesh smoothing different. 3ds max don’t touch any vertices with 2 edges (like corner of plane at screen shot or other cases), while zbrush do it :frowning: so we get different meshes. this is no good… :cry: