Zbrush Texture Baking for Clothing

So I've been playing around with baking clothing in zbrush again now that I have learned quite a bit more about it. I am using projection master for the front, back, and side angles. My problem comes in baking the sides of the avatar. I bake them and it projects the information to the front of the shirt, but not the back. I bake in 3 different stages, saving each texture as I go, the front part, the back part, then the sides. This should give me a shading/highlighting on the front AND back of the avatar when I do the sides, but it's not. I'm attaching a picture to show what I mean.



*higher res version: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2170/2217015768_c1e48575e0_o.jpg
Does anyone have any ideas what's causing this? I'm baking from the exact side of the model, my model is not rotated funny because I hit shift to make sure it's rotated perfectly. If anyone knows anything I can do to fix this, please help me !

I'm using Zbrush 3. Oh and maybe I should mention I'm using the avatar objs that Namssor Daguerre put here on SL quite a while back. Dunno if that has anything to do with it either.

Oh also, I was wondering if anyone could help me figure something ELSE out. When I put my pre cut clothing textures on the zbrush avatar, the lines that look good on the body in SL are jagged on the Zbrush body I have. Maybe it's just the one I'm using, but either way, it kinda prevents me from drawing the clothing on because if I draw it on, it looks jagged inside SL. If I use the precut textures for SL, they look jagged in Zbrush. Anyone know anything I can do to fix this? If anyone has any info or if you are willing to sell your .obj avatar (I'll pay top dollar for a good one), please respond to this. I have no idea if it's just me or it's just that this model is jagged or if it's just that that's what you have to deal with when using zzbrush.

I don't have any solutions but I have the exact same experiences with ZBrush and Namssor's .obj file. For the bake on the avatar I fudged a fix in Photoshop which took hours.

What is more of a concern is the jaggedness. The front is not too bad, but the back is terrble. This was quite a shock as I had ambitions of making high quality clothes using ZBrush.

I drew nice clean curving lines for the straps across the back here in ZBrush. The resulting texture is unusable.

What software do people like for painting on the avatar that gives good results?

My ZTool models for the male and female avatars are pretty much exact replicas of the mannequins that you download off the SL web site (slight corrections were made for avatar symmetries that were off a few fractions of a degree on the originals).

You have at your disposal in ZBrush the means to alter the surface of the avatar though subdivisions with "Smt" and "Suv" set to active and "crease" set to 1 . To further smooth the geometry, you can also use the "smooth brush" at various subdivisions and Z Intensities. Baking at the highest resolution (4096x4096) also makes a difference. You can correct for artifacts and misalignments much easier at a higher resolution. Also, people are welcome to alter UVW placement to create a non-overlapping model. I would offer up mine, but they are highly customized to my skinning work flow and not very intuitive (involves UVW translation in a 3rd party app) for general use. It's also extremely impractical to offer up models on the web saved with 5 subdivisions! I don't have the space or the bandwidth to support it.

As far as lighting goes, I wish ZBrush had precision placement for lighting, but as far as I know, it doesn't. The workaround for that is the avatar rotation, which can be done with precision. It sounds like Sae is doing the correct thing with symmetrical lighting and avatar rotation. The inconsistencies on the sides of the avatar can be eliminated by blending the textures away from the seams. I like to set the projection master at "Double Sided" with the "Fade" off to capture the entire texture projection on the sides. It is then a matter of blending the various segments/layers in Photoshop in such a way as to preserve the seam blending. It is best to think of the lighting coming from six sides of a cube (top, bottom, front, back, side left, side right) and to blend it convincingly.

Here's a quick and dirty alteration I did with the Female ZTool. It took about 2 minutes to get these smoother surface results (5 subdivisions and brush smoothing). Those alterations should make a world of difference when translating back to the in world SL avatar:

Nam, thanks for the reply.

The female model I use is one that I have already set to division 5 AND done surface smoothing with the smooth tool. I dunno if I just didn't do it enough or what, but I'm going to go in and play with the model a bit more and see what I can do.

I've figured out how to completely eliminate the ugly weird seams most people talk about getting when texture baking in Zbrush, but for some reason, I still can't get this model to project right on the sides. I'm actually already using the double sided and fade method you mentioned as well.

I'm going to try baking at a higher resolution *I've been baking them at 1024x1024.* As far as altering UVW placement, I don't know the first thing about that. If anyone can point me to where I can learn, I'm fully capable of reading something and picking it up ;D

As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm not doing that you mentioned is baking at a high resolution. I hope that helps, but something tells me I'm still going to have issues baking at the sides. I never have this issue on regular sculpts I do, so I'm kind of baffled. As for the jaggedness of the model, all I can think to do is put a precut texture on it and smooth the avatar til the shirt looks right, but I don't have any clue how to get the avatar as smooth as I feel it should be. It looks smooth in Zbrush, it's just that anything I draw onto that avatar is distorted like crazy when viewed inside SL.

Anyway..yeah, I'm off to see if I can figure anything out. Thanks for the info.

Look at this application - Ultimate Unwrap 3D (US $60)

http://www.unwrap3d.com/

Maybe reckeck the symmetry of your lighting?