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View Full Version : ? zbrush highdetail paintjob -> lowpoly object ?

elzilcho
05-31-2007, 08:21 PM
I am planning to purchase zbrush soon, and i've heard about the body vertex painting tools, but only recently come to understand that you can only paint as much detail as the number of vertices allow. so zbrush wouldn't be very useful for painting onto low poly objects such as primitives.

firstly, am i correct in presuming this?

and secondly, is there a way around this? for example, with the normal maps, zbrush can generate maps from high poly objects and stick them onto the low poly version. so perhaps zbrush can do the same with a colormap? i'd love to be able to paint onto any low poly object like a sculpture somehow, and use it in my games, without the uv mapping hassles.

here's hoping that it's possible.
Yanlec
06-01-2007, 01:20 AM
yep your right, thats what i do, increase subdivions, paint details(enable colorize button), then col->texture, z3 cant create more then 2048 though, export texture and use it in another app or directly into zbrush.
elzilcho
06-01-2007, 08:04 AM
and that doesn't involve any uv-mapping? :)

does the low poly version look the same on the color map when it's unwrapped as the subdivided one? ie. are all the riht uv's in similar positions each time?

cheers for the reply.
Gwot
06-01-2007, 12:08 PM
When converting the polypainted surface to a texture you just apply AUV to the high rez. This will give you one of those messy ZB textures, which works fine for baking out to a low poly object with its own UV set in a 3d app. So in XSI I could import the high rez model and AUV texture from Zbrush, then bake color, AO, and normals onto the low poly using Ultimapper.
monkeynutz
06-04-2007, 01:11 PM
you're correct in that ZBrush assigns each face a color so you can't paint a low poly mesh with much detail. There are several easy ways around this though. From what I understand you want to use this feature to paint game models, yes? Well, assuming you're not normal mapping, in which case you may as well sculpt to your heart's content and then paint the high res version, you could simply subdivide with the 'Smt' (smooth divide) button unchecked (it's checked by default) to give yourself enough polygons for polypainting without changing the shape of your mesh in any way. Of course, the methods mentioned before will work as well, but I think this is as close as you can get to painting directly on the model you're going to be using through ZBrush.

Personally, even if not normal mapping, I prefer to use a combination of 3D painting/2D texturing and color/light baking. I always like using the surface sampler (or Ultimapper for you XSI guys I suppose) for a starting point on the light information with textures that have shadows and highlights painted in.

Also, YannickLeclerc, I've derived a 4096 color map from ZBrush 3's polypainting feature so I'm not exactly where you got the idea that it was capped at 2048.
Yanlec
06-04-2007, 01:44 PM
just checked it out again, must have misunderstood something on the wiki tutorial, sorry about that
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