Zbrush and Cinema4d play nice?

[Per-Anders]

No, Cinema is just about the perfect companion to ZBrush, it's materials are even set up to directly handle the standard ZBrush output from it's maps by default. You don't need high res base meshes, just turn on SPD.

[Theropoda]

works almost perfectly:

http://home.arcor.de/dinosaurs3d/panoplosaurus_wire.jpg

[phobos]

Per-Anders sorry I lost you. What is SPD?
Theropoda. The subdivision levels you have in your model are in zbrush?(I've seen them mentioned as levels only in zbrush). If that's the case I want it to work the other way around. From zbrush to cinema4d.
If it's in cinema4d isn't 5 subdivisions quite high?? If you have that many polygons in only one object it would be quite hard to manage a scene with even a few objects. Let alone animate it.
Per-Anders you mean that the materials can be imported to zbrush? At this point I don't mind about that. I would like to get my model from zbrush to cinema4d.
I probably misunderstood so if you could give more details that would be great.
Thanks!

[Srek]

SPD is Sub Polygon Displacement. If you use this the object will be subdivided at rendertime in a way that is faster and less memory consuming than real geometry. The level of subdivision can be set in the material.
If you have the Advanced Render module you can activate the option in the displacement channel.
Cheers
Björn

[LemonNado]

Stupid question in this context...

Often I err regarding the spd details. Then C4D blows up because of the excessive memory the mesh in question demands at render time. Is there a way to get the memory load information claculated before things go downhill? Like a rule of thumb. Like base mesh polys*spd level*unknown factor= aprox. amount of megabytes ram usage.

Cheers
Rainer

[AdamT]

Stupid question in this context...

Often I err regarding the spd details. Then C4D blows up because of the excessive memory the mesh in question demands at render time. Is there a way to get the memory load information claculated before things go downhill? Like a rule of thumb. Like base mesh polys*spd level*unknown factor= aprox. amount of megabytes ram usage.

Cheers
Rainer
Not sure about that, but you can set the maximum RAM that can be allocated to SPD in preferences (Common).

[Per-Anders]

SPD uses as much memory as you give it in the preferences (edit->preferences->common->sub-polygon displacement memory (mb) ) it shouldn't use any more, by "blows up" do you mean freezes? Because I've not had SPD crash on me ever, just run very very slowly when the detail is too high, but I can always stop the render (though it can take a while to stop). It can take a long time to calculate if you give it too little memory, the more memory it has the faster it will calculate (up to a point,, though it only calculates on one processor unfortunately), there's no levesl rule of thimb because it's down to how dense your original mesh is. Ecah SPD level is the equivalent of subdividing your mesh again (i.e. every quad polygon turns int o4 additional polygons). Don't forget there is no need to be dividing your mesh beforehand or using something like Hypernurbs when using SPD.

[NWoolridge]

Per-Anders sorry I lost you. What is SPD?
Theropoda. The subdivision levels you have in your model are in zbrush?(I've seen them mentioned as levels only in zbrush). If that's the case I want it to work the other way around. From zbrush to cinema4d.
If it's in cinema4d isn't 5 subdivisions quite high?? If you have that many polygons in only one object it would be quite hard to manage a scene with even a few objects. Let alone animate it.
Per-Anders you mean that the materials can be imported to zbrush? At this point I don't mind about that. I would like to get my model from zbrush to cinema4d.
I probably misunderstood so if you could give more details that would be great.
Thanks!

The top image shows the geometry in C4D. After applying the ZBrush generated displacement map and turning on sub-polygon displacement, the _rendered_ complexity is shown in the middle image (the geometry still hasn't been changed, just its sub-division at render time). Upping the subdivision level to 5 (in sub-polygon displacement) gives the bottom result.

So, it is behaving exactly the way you want.

Nick

[Mahagon]

Hi,
There are free tutorials about exporting meshes and textures from Cinema to ZBrush and vice versa available at Cineversity:
Click Here (http://www.cineversity.com/tutorials/search.asp?sor=zbrush&sfo=1&son=all&sft=time&stm=&smb=&act=Search)

Further information are provided at Pixologic's wiki:
Click Here (http://www.zbrush.info/wiki/index.php/ZBrush_to_Cinema4D)

Those helped me a lot!

Best regards

[LemonNado]

Thanks for the info's. Did not know about the pref settings!
It never froze on me, except for the expected calculations.
But if the level is set very high, then it happens sometimes that C4D crashes. I traced it back to the MS mempry fragmentation and the resulting inability to provide contiguous memory blocks... As of then things go downhill. Not a bug... also happens with VUE, XSI, and the occasional Modo crash as well... All for the same reason. But all that is XP and hopefully soon history.
Cheers
Rainer

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