zbrush->sculpty displacement map?

I have had zbrush for a week and its really cool. I am starting to get the basics, but I can see I have a lot to learn.

I have tried to make a normal map from following the zbrush guide with no success.

There is a plug-in called Zmapper that appears to be available only for the PC and I am using a mac.

I have been reading the sculpty wiki and I understand the concept for the sculpty displacement map.

At this point I am utterly clueless on how to get a sculpty map from zbrush. I am willing to keep trying and will continue to learn zbrush. If I figure this out I am more than willing to make a tutorial or a script.

Can anyone give me some hints or point me in the right direction for the specifics of zbrush?

Thanks

Well, all i know is that ZBrush can export .obj Files, and I'm working on a Converter for
.obj -> sculpty.
Its still buggy, the results can have bad normals (faces pointing to the inside),
and hard to use (needs a special Set of UV Coordinates).
I do my best to get it working.

Thread obj->sculpty

Hmm... i wonder if .NET Stuff works on a Mac ? would be nice if it did.
I dont know anything about the Mac.

.exe files do not run on the mac operating system. It is possible to install Windows on a mac, but I am reluctant to pay for a windows operating system.

Some .NET stuff will in fact run on a Mac, subject to several limitations of course. If you install Mono, then you can run most .NET assemblies. It's been 6 months since I've done anything substantial with Mono, but at that time the System.Drawing and System.Windows.Forms implementations were still buggy and incomplete, so any .NET project that used those namespaces heavily would be pretty buggy.


Cindy, I've used Reflector to look at your obj2sculpty project, and I'm pretty confident from what I see in there that it will work in Mono without any changes whatsoever.

.

Thanks, Robby. This is hopeful news. I installed Mono and I have something in my library called MonoFrame work. How do I run the Obt2Sculpt.exe? I click on it and the system asks me what application?

Thanks, Cindy. I opened the terminal and entered

mono obj2sculpt.exe

per the instructions at the link you posted and got

Cannot open assembly obj2sculpt.exe

I wondered if it needed a pathname. I tried moving the .exe to the same folder as the terminal but got the same message. Does anyone have any suggestions?

looks like a case of 'file not found'
so the terminal found mono, but mono did not find sculpt2obj.exe
you should get the same error message if you use a nonsense name for the 'assembly'
like 'mono nothere.exe'
if i was you, i would make sure sculpt2obj.exe is in the current directory
simple linux-style command should work here, like ls cd pwd and stuff
Tutorial here

so the 'ls' command lists sculpt2obj.exe ?

Thanks to your suggestions I am making progress. I put it in the right directory and got it to start execution. I typed

mono obj2sculpt.exe lizard.OBJ

it found the .OBJ file and displayed info about vertices and faces and the numbers seemed right. I have 340 vertices in that OBJ.

Then there was a message about a quantity of bad pixels.

Then I got System.Dl lNotFoundException

System.DllNotFoundException ?
my program needs no extra dll's, so it must be something
missing in mono

the 'bad pixels' message says that the work is almost done,
only some more calculations and writing the .bmp file
this can be the problem, the bmp writer needs stuff
from System.Drawing... well, this can be changed

There was more but that was the exception that stopped the execution. I'm not able to cut and paste the complete message now. I have my laptop here at a friends house but I am using his computer to connect to the internet. I'll post the complete message tonight (late) or tomorrow. Thanks anyway for writing the converter and trying to help. I learned a little more about my mac. I hope we can get it to work and there may be other mac users who want to try your converter.

Cheers,
-Nancy

i edited the above message, i think i can fix the problem
my '3dm2sculpt' program has a .tga writer inside.. i can
use it in my 'obj2sculpt' program, so it should be more compatible.
this will take some time... (making c# from c++)

OK, a quick hack, writes .tga now, should be more compatible (i hope)
see Atached File

It is executing and generating a .tga but the .tga is not workable as a sculpty texture. I have tried on several zbrush generated .OBJ shapes/files with similar results.

How many bad pixels did my program report ?
It looks like the UV Map has a lot of holes,
my exporter can not handle that.
I hope i can make it easier, but that will
be really hard to do.

Just for Fun, i patched the 'good' pixels together in GIMP.
Still not perfect, but it looks like a sculptie in my previewer.
If all ZBrush Files are like this, there might be a way
to skip the bad pixels and take only the good ones.
I will think about it.

Close enough! Last night I tried to "patch" with a gaussian blur which gave me a sphere or a vertex vomit. Today I worked out a better way to patch in photoshop. My first Zbrush->Second Life sculpty. Wooohooo! This has been driving me bananas (and apples).

THANKS soooooo much. Thanks for helping me figure out how to run it on my mac and for doing the tga hack.

I'm not sure if I have holes? I started with a 32 x 32 divided sphere in Zbrush and made some simple bumps with the sculpting tools. I don't see any gaps in the mesh but perhaps I am not understanding the concepts well enough.

Here is what displays when I run the converter.

nancy-ibsens-computer:~ nancyibsen$ mono obj2sculpt.exe bumpo.OBJ
reading bumpo.OBJ
1056 Vertices
992 Faces
1056 UVs
SculptMap Size will be 64 x 64
doing 4063232 point-in-triangle tests (maybe a few less)
................................................................
3104 of 4096 Pixels are BAD.

all done. Hit a Key to exit.

The Problem is the UV Map. My Program uses it to find which Triangles are connected.
ZBrush creates tiny Tiles as a UV Map, so my poor Program fails miserably here.
I found a nice (old) Tutorial about UV Mapping in ZBrush here : http://206.145.80.239/zbc/showthread.php?t=8558
Its good to learn about this if you are serious about 3D Modeling.

Well, i did a lot of testing and got Feedback from the beta Testers,
it seems like my 'make a sculpty from the UV-Map' - Solution
is not good enough.
Its very hard to use and takes a long Time to get the UV-Map done.
So, i will rewrite the Main Part of the Program,
i want it to take every .obj File, without the need for UV Coordinates.

This tool does not meet my needs for my goal of making marketable sculpty prim avatars. But it is still tremendously satisfying to have something to mess around with. I'm losing details but I can define a general shape and make a smooth organic sculpty which is a big step in the right direction.

The loss of Detail is because the Mesh gets 'scanned' in a evenly spaced grid.
Its possible to preserve all the Detail as long as the Vertex count
is not more than 1024 - i have to use the input mesh itself as 'grid'.
Well, i started the rewrite, i hope you try again when i get it done.

The progress continues.
http://www.throughlinedesign.com/secondlife/saguaroPic.jpg
was made with Zbrush and your converter and patching and tweaking the maps in photoshop.

I found that if I start with a 16 x 16 sphere in zbrush, I get a lower percentage of bad pixels and pretty good preservation of details. I look forword to the next version of your converter.

hi there, i don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but i noticed that sylvia you were having problems with things pointing in when they should have been out, etc. i know that when the sculpties were first introduced, the orientation was the other way around. i believe it was mentioned that x/y were reversed. anyhoo, i just wanted to let u know just in case.