Subtools in Zbrush *pulls hair out*

Maybe I missed something somewhere...if I did, feel free to point me in the direction of whatever it is I missed.

Anyway, my frustrations this time are because of subtools. If you are a zbrush user, you will eventually want to use more than one piece in your sculpted items to get better results, like on shoes and such. The way I've found to do this is by using subtools, which seems to work just fine inside zbrush, but I'm having issues with it period.

Ok, my method is simply to have my initial sphere loaded that works for SL and then to append another copy of it under subtools. Once I do that, I'm left with two sphere. So far, seems fine. I sculpt my two items and yay it looks good. I have no problem saving them or texturing them either.
Now, by the time i get them in second life, I notice something odd. The APPENDED sculpt is TINY. The more appended shapes I add to it, the smaller the result of each one, regardless of the initial size in zbrush. You can literally tell my sculpt order, just by looking at the size of the sculpts. For a while I've been working through this, just sizing up the appended model to be the right size, but I've run head on into a wall. If you're using more than about two sculpts with this "broken" method, the sculpts look bad because they are too small. They become jagged when sized up and look distorted, even though they should NOT look like that.
If I haven't confused you too bad, then you've just read that anytime I use subtools, they are TINY compared to the size they should be once I look at them in Second Life. You can see the difference in the sculpt maps even, the color on the original sphere will be bright and rainbowy, while my subtool maps will be cloudy and such.
HELP? I'm sooo stuck. How do you guys make an item using multiple sculpts that works inside second life? Am I doing something wrong?

Hey!,

Which program are you using to convert your sculpties?

As far as I'm aware there's only Maya that can convert a model made from multiple parts. It even has a script that can reassemble and resize the parts for you.

AC3D might be another option. It's supposed to be able to take a multi-part model and create a sculpty for each part. But from what I read on the their site, it wont preserve the relative size of each sculpty. In other words you'll have to resize and position each sculpty manually.

Hm, I was under the impression you could do this in Zbrush...is Maya really my only option? Maya is extremely pricey..though I have looked into it to purchase. I've been getting along great in zbrush so it sucks to have to think about spending nearly 2000 on this program. *wishes she was a student lol*

So yeah, as I said, I was under the impression that if I used subtools it would just work the same way as doing a regular sculpt, but obviously I'm way off base

I suppose Maya does produce some outstanding results on things, it's just so darn expensive.

No, you're right. You should be able to export and convert each individual part and then manually rebuild your model in SL.

You do know that most convertors will always produce a sculpty of the same size?.

So if you were to create a scene in ZBrush that consisted of a mouse, an elephant and a whale. and then you were to convert those parts in order of size then it would seem as though each part was shrinking.

This isn't happening, is it?

Yes it's not happening, each successive subtool is smaller compared to its bounding box, centered on the total of the subtools up to then... so the first subtool is exported normally, then the second subtool gets exported as if ZBrush is sizing it according to both subtool1 and subtool2. Then the third one is even smaller, it's bounding box including the first two subtools as well. They even get exported off-center from the sculpt-map as a result (assuming they were assymetrically aligned within ZBrush)

What you describe is true of any single tool, but whenever I add subtools it breaks in the above manner.

Oh and to answer your above question, I've been using wings3d to export for Second Life.

I went in and took some snaps to illustrate. This was a 4-part boot I was working on...


First, all the prims by themselves... note they are all the same size and position in terms of the prim params, but are sized differently and offset due to the sculpt maps


The last subtool I exported, demonstrating the most distortion. You can see in this snapshot how "muddy" the sculpt map looks - this is because the vertices are all pushed to one side of the sculpt map.


All the prims selected, with the bounding box shown. This is just a same-sized box prim I put around to demonstrate how each subtool is offset... definitely not how you were describing the export should work...

Damn!

Are you using the latest version of ZBrush? 3.1?

The only other thing I can suggest is that you get your hands on the Zscript known as Make1Mesh and export your model into another program like AC3D and convert the parts from there.

Make1Mesh can be downloaded from here:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=47677

Despite its name, it doesn't really make one mesh. It simply exports all your parts as a grouped object. Nearly all modelers have the ability to group and ungroup objects. Grouping is basically the same as SL's linking.

No, I'm using 3.0 because when I tried 3.1 I had major issues with it. I don't even remember exactly what the problem was, it has been a while. 3.0 seemed to be ok until I tried subtools. I'm going to look into your links and see what I can find out. It may just be a bug like you say. I'm glad I figured out how this SHOULD be working...

You could also use my convertors here:

/8/b2/225856/2.html#post1783021

These convertors will always reorientate and scale your objects. The only problem is that if you're using an object that's based on an imported sphere then my convertor may taunt you, as they've been designed to be used with ZBrush's own objects.