Confused about final UV & texture steps in ZBrush retopo process

#1

OK, so I followed the following process:

-Created high poly sculpt in ZBrush, polypainted and everything.
-Retopologized with zspheres
-Turned projection on to see my high poly details.
-Created an adaptive skin with density of 1 from that topology.
-Made that polymesh 3d and used UVMaster to unwrap and make UVs

But how do I get all those original high poly details as diffuse/bump maps that map to the low poly model’s UVs? I tried copying and pasting UVs but it won’t take… I’m missing some fundamental concept here or if there’s a better way. :banghead:

#2

As far as I know there are two ways:

You have your new retopo’d tool as active subtool of your original tool (must be visible), hit project all in the subtool menu, hit divide, hit project all… repeat until all your details are captured in the new mesh to your satisfaction.
Or you could have simply created an adaptive skin with the density necessary to capture all your details (your new mesh mesh will have as many subdiv levels as the densitiy number).

Afterwards you use UV master to create your UVs and use its “work on clone” option wich will create a copy of your lowest subdiv level to create UVs, which you can then copy and paste (in UV master) to your retopo’d, multi-subdiv tool.

Then you can use the Multi-Map Exporter plugin to export the mesh and all its maps (including bump or displacement of your details) from any subdiv level you choose. Make sure you set the same subdiv level for mesh and displacement map export, the plugin will calculate the differences between the chosen level and the highest level as displacement map.

Hope that helps!

#3

@archaeotect, thx. I used the adaptive skin method with the following steps for anyone who’s interested:

  1. With my retoplogized zphere tool selected, I created an adaptive skin at density 5. This gave me a new tool with 5 subdiv levels.
  2. With the subdiv slider set at 1, I exported the tool as an .obj
  3. I took that .obj into headus uv layout to edit uvs. I had never used that program but found it fairly straightforward via the “Quick Start” in the docs.
  4. I imported into Maya and did some final editing of UVs. I did it simply because I’m comfortable with how to manipulate UVs in there. headus did a pretty good job already.
  5. I re-exported .obj from Maya.
  6. Back in ZBrush, with the subdiv slider still set at 1, I imported the .obj. What happens it overwrites the lowest subdiv level (topology hasn’t changed) but now it has UVs. You’re still on the same tool.
  7. At this point, I put the subdiv level on highest level, went to Texture map and clicked “New from Polypaint” and then “Clone” to put it in the texture menu and then export as PSD. I noticed the texture map was upside down but fixed that in Photoshop.
  8. I also went to Normal map and did the same as above.

This is for the Unity game engine so I don’t need other maps. I’m sure there’s many other ways to do this as well!

#4

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