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Zremesh Pipeline

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi all,

I am finally throwing myself into Zbrush, I have used the Zremesher, understand what it’s for and how it work,
but I still have some questions about how/when to use it.

Let’s say I have a high polygon Character. and I need to animate it let say in C4D
I make a copy of my High Poly Character, Zremesh It, so I have a low poly one.

Then from my low poly character i do my UVs using UV Mapper.

And then what?? I have tried to copy my UVs onto the High poly but it doesn’t paste.

How do I get the same UVs on Zremesh model as the High poly so I can then export my displacement and Normals??

Many Thanks,

Romano.

#2

Your UVs wont paste because they’ll only work on a purely identical model. Because zremesher completely retopologizes the mesh, the two models no longer match.

There are two main options. If you’re baking the maps in zbrush, then you can instead use the Tool: Subtool: Project All feature to project the details from the sculpt back onto the new mesh. You’ll get better results if you project, subdivide, project, subdivide, and repeat the process until you have all the detail back.

If you’re baking externally in a program like xnormal, then the sculpt wont need UVs. You’ll have have to export the sculpt as an OBJ along with the new lowpoly/UV’d mesh, and load them both up into the program you’re baking in.

#3

Hi Cryrid,
thanks for your time, I’ll have a go with the “project all” method, I saw à few tutorials about zremeshing but none of them talked through the process of UVs once retopoed.

cheers,

Romano

#4

ZRemesher is a great tool

I used Project All after ZRemeshing a model i had already polypainted and detailed before upgrading to R6, it worked perfectly

Below is my workflow with ZRemesher - I use it for video game content so i have a specific polycount target for the final model, your use may be different

  • Create a base mesh model with ZSpheres or import a model i created elsewhere

  • Use ZRemesher to remesh the model to the polycount i will be using in the game (the ZRemesher polycount is in thousands and will actually be double what ZBrush says when imported into another program, example: 5K will be 10K polys in say Softimage, Tris)

  • Create UVs (i usually just use UV Master to automatically create them, works for my purposes)

  • Subdevide until i have enough detail to work with (usually around 3mil polys) then i detail the mesh

  • Polypaint once i’m done with the geometry

  • Create and export a texture map from polypaint and a tangent normal map

  • Export the lowest SubD level (the final model)

  • Use NDO2 to create my Specular, AO and Height maps from the normalmap since i don’t like what ZBrush generates and NDO2 gives you moe control over the output)

Then i combine everything in the game engine