ZBrush & Wings & Sculpty Space & aargh!

I think I've read every post on the forum about ZBrush, Sculpty Space and the Wings exporter, watched Vlad's excellent videos, gone through the ZBrushCentral videos plus any others I came across and I'm still confused

I started with a .tga of a sculpt map from an object I already have in SL. I took it into Sculpty Space (where it looked just as it does inworld) and saved it as an .obj file. I then importned that .obj file into Wings and Wings told me the object only had 1984 polys, 2976 edges and 994 vertices, so Omei's exporter wouldn't work.

I imported the same .obj file into ZBrush and ZBrush saw 2048 polys and 1089 points.

Therefore I thought I'd better start with Hypatia's 6463sphere.obj which I imported into ZBrush and saw it had 4032 polys. I flattened and squeezed it only, verified it still had the same no. of polys and exported it as a new .obj file.

I imported the new .obj file into Wings, which recognised the 4032 polys and allowed me to export the .bmp file with no problem.

I imported the Wings-created .bmp into Sculpty Space and exported it straight out again as another new .obj file. When imported into Wings, the new .obj had 1984 polys, 2976 edges and 994 vertices and in ZBrush it had 2048 polys and 1089 points!

I can see that Sculpty Space is halving the poly count (not sure why, but I can live with that ) ... what I don't understand (well, a small part of what I don't understand!) is why Wings doesn't recognise all those polys but ZBrush does.

I've bought one of the inworld sculpty tools which creates either a .bmp or .tga (can't remember which) sculpt map and was told I could use Sculpty Space to convert the map to an .obj file to continue modelling/texturing it in a 3D program. However if Sculpty Space is modifying the no. of polys in this way, that kind of puts the kybosh on ultimately using the Wings exporter to create the final sculpt map.

I'm not complaining at all, I'm in awe of the resources that people have so generously provided for free, but I'd appreciate if someone could tell me if what I've experienced is the expected outcome or whether I've messed up along the line somewhere.

Thanks

Isobel

Not sure exactly what you are trying to accomplish, other than using several programs to work on a sculpty. Not an easy task sometimes as the various importers and exporters all seem to have slightly different rules.

Have you tried importing your sculptmaps directly into Wings3D rather than going through SculptySpace? Might be able to eliminate a step and that way you'd be sure that the object is compatible with Omei's exporter.

I've not used SculptySpace, but am going to download and check it out now.

Vlad, thanks for responding. It was your tutorials that got me using ZBrush to start with

I was trying to set up a workflow, so experimenting with how the various programs worked together. AFAIK Wings will only import a .bmp sculpt map not a .tga so I thought to use Sculpty Space to do a quick conversion to .obj.

Isobel

Glad that you found my ZBrush tutorial helpful.

If you have access to something like Photoshop or the (Free) GIMP, you can convert that .tga to a .bmp file.
http://www.gimp.org/features/

There are also websites that you can use to convert your images for free:
http://www.online-utility.org/image_converter.jsp

Yes I have Photoshop I was hoping to avoid the extra step of .tga > .bmp > .obj.

I'd also love to know if SculptySpace is supposed to behave as it does on my PC or whether I'm missing something and why Wings doesn't see the same number of polys that ZBrush does.

Isobel