3DS Max and ZBrush

I am want to play with using 3ds Max and Zbursh and try to do some projects.

I have imported the Cybernetic obj file into 3ds Max and and moved all the UV shells into a 2x2 grid which each cell being one of the areas like head, upper, lower and skirt so I can work with all the areas at one in ZBrush. I am thinking when I am done I will cut it up on Photoshop before uploading.

So on to my question. In 3dx Max I did a connect operation on the head, upper and lower sections. There is a line at the edge where they coonect which I believe is because of the normls. If I turn normal edting on I see 4 normals coming from each vertex, only where the sections where conencted. Since the all have different vectors this is creating a line at the waist.

How should I be connecting these sections so that I get the vertices and normals correct where the object sections meet?

Athough I connected the sections do I still need to weld the vertices? Should I weld or fix the holes? Will welding mess up my UV locations so I will have problems later when I upload the images into SL?

I know there are some other projects out there but I want to do this myself so I understand the process. In ZBrush I want to scupt, generate normal maps and do some painting.

Any other issues I should be aware of in setting this up?

I will be happy to share the 3ds Max and Zbrush files back once I get them setup if anyone wants.

I am a 3DS Max user, but not a ZBrush user. I've played with various ZBrush demos over the years, but I've never stuck with it.

For fixing the open seams in the 3d model, I prefer to weld at the Edge level. I always keep a very close eye on things when welding, and then double-check with STL-Check.

You should be able to fix the normals with Smoothing Groups. And then double-check with Edit Normal modifier if you feel the need to get into some nitty-gritty. Or just do it all in Edit Normals.

Welding UV verts isn't exactly needed. If you do, there are only two real benefits. The first is smaller OBJ file size and the other is smaller memory footprint. However, I don't know how well ZBrush can handle non-welded UVs once you start sub-dividing. Personally, I've welded all of the UV verts in my working OBJ.

I imagine once you get into ZBrush and start sub-dividing, you are going to see some nasty pinching in areas. For example, the buttocks are a big pain for me (in 3DS Max when I use Meshsmooth). The front of the shoulder where it meets the bicep is another problem area for me. Some of the work that I do is uber sensitive to this pinching, but you might be able to work despite it.

Another thing you might have to be careful with is the mirrored UV parts. This is especially true of the arm when doing normal render things. But you can probably get away without worrying too much about the foot.

Feel free to drop some notes about any of this. I know I'm listening and I'm sure a few others are as well.

Here is the steps i ended up taking to prepare the Cybernetic mesh for Zbrush.

1. I did unwrap UV and the head, upper, lower and skirt into for quadrants of the 0,0 to 1,1 square so there isn't any over lapping it the UVs.

1.5 Forget, I scaled the mesh 10x, was easier to work with than the initial size that was loaded. I couldn't zoom in enough before the camera started clipping the model.

2. Used Compound Object connect to connect torso to the head, and then a again to connect the legs to the torse. I had to check the Ends checkbox or it would connect things like the mouth or eye to the torse instead of the neck area. I found I had to play with which section i connected to the others or got strange results.

3. I converted to editable poly and welded all the vertices around the waist and around the next. This seemed to fix all the normals for those vertices.

NOTE: I don't know how to remake all the Normals in 3ds Max or do other normal operations. There may be a better way to clean up the normals. Anyone know?

4. Turned on edge faces so i could see the polygons for the mesh.

5. There seems to be 3 places on each side around the breat that done sloppy. I went into editable poly and deleted the problematic polys, did a border selection and capped the area. Then cut it so that there was never any vertices in the middel of a line or any polygons that had more than 3 vertices in it. I had to do that in 4 places, 2 on each side around the breast area.

NOTE: Haven checked if that will mess up the UVs. Need to look after I make textures and upload to SL.

6. After doing this i had several normals at each of the vertices that were part of the capped geometry so went back into Edit Normals and editted those.

Here is an image of the mesh loaded in Zbrush and cranked up to 6 divisions. It is 5 million polygons.

http://kevin-tweedy.com/?p=21

There are a few issues I am seeing that I haven't looked into yet. Not sure why it is so rough looking and all the wavyness. I guess I need to do some kind of smooth operations or recaculate the normals. The other spot on the belly I am guess is a bad normal.

I am going to use the other Zbrush examples I have for SecondLife and see how they look after I load them in and divide and if they look better try to figure out the differences.

If anyone has some suggestions that would be great.

The badness you are looking at is, for the most part, bad topology. Triangles and poles don't exactly play nice with mesh smoothing (full mesh sub-div). Sometimes you will see badness with quads that are long and thin depending on various factors.

Some of it you can fix to a certain extent. The furthest I have gone is to completely rebuild the buttocks. But I have yet to completely rebuild the shoulder area, which is proving extremely difficult due to UV seams.

Welcome to the club.

"Hi, my name is Abu and the mesh makes my head hurt."

Ha, thanks, yeah. I looked at other models that are avaible for ZBrush and looks like they modified the model to have quads. So going to experient with that.

Next i want to start looking into morphing and making morphs that replicate the shape in SL. Looks like it will be a lot of work but to get the shadows and highlights correct I think I need to do it.

Thinking to do the morphs in 3ds Max and export OBJs to ZBrush for developing normal maps and various textures.