[Half Life]

But I thought I'd post this tutorial anyway -- the basic idea is to take "low-poly" non-subdivision geometry into ZBrush and use ZBrush to paint a texture, but keep the original geometry.



Feed-back is welcome.

Best,
Jason.

[rusteberg]

dude, you made that way more complicated than it needed to be....

all you have to do is disable the "smt" button inside your geometry rollout.

[Half Life]

Not really, the geometry will not polypaint well because of poor distribution of polys -- which is a result of Sketchup creating large n-gons which will neither subdivide or polypaint well.

Best,
Jason.

[rusteberg]

[Half Life]

Here's the geometry -- try for yourself.

Reading comprehension, it's not just for kids... try paying better attention before criticizing next time and you won't look like an idiot.

Best,
Jason.

[rusteberg]

i'm providing feedback telling you that there's an easier way of doing this without getting your head tangled up in all the hot air you're putting out there. if you don't want the feedback, then don't welcome it.

here's some pretty fucked up looking polygons (if you ask me)



and here's a pretty decent result (if you ask me) painting texture onto it within zbrush without it loosing it's shape AND done so without projection mapping.



you asked for feedback..... i'm giving it to you without sugar coating it.

i already know i'm not that smart, and i've learned to accept that.

[Half Life]

With the geometry I posted I have to go up to 7 million polys before I can get close to the detail I can with about half a million doing it my way.

Better detail by far and much easier to sculpt if you want to create normal maps -- I'm all about getting the best possible quality.

It takes 20 minutes because I'm explaining it all -- I can do it all from beginning to end in about 5 minutes and get much better results than half-assing it.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I encourage criticism -- I have no fear of being wrong... that's how you learn.

However I am only interested in getting better, not worse... there's already plenty of crappy half-ass instruction out there that doesn't take the time to go deeper.

Expedience is not always the same as efficiency.

Best,
Jason.

[Polyxo]

Jason,
don't get me wrong but I would also say that this process is too complicated, by several orders of magitude even.
All you want to do is basically paint with decent resolution on top of a Mesh which doesn't subdivide without
artefacts. Meshes as they typically get output by Sketchup or Nurbs application. Right so far?
For this kind of Input I would highly recommend not to use use Zbrush at all - due to its Vertex-Painting approach.
This program is awesome but already in its DNA already is geared toward subdividable meshes.
What Rusteberg recommends may bring partial success and may be suitable for some cases.
But why don't you use a Painting Program which lets you paint perfectly crisp onto a not subdivided mesh directly from SketchUp?
3DCoat with its direct Painting lets you paint with 8K Texture onto an imported Cube with 6 Quads (or 12 Triangles as well)
Actually 8K on each face if you want. The time you save here pays you 3DCoat in one day.

Holger

[Half Life]

No doubt -- that is a strength of 3DCoat and especially Mari and a weakness of ZBrush (currently).

But please do bear in mind that this is in direct reference to a ZBrush 4 training series I did for VTC -- all I was trying to show here is that it is possible to get good (even great) results using ZBrush with a little bit of skill and time. If I was doing a 3DCoat tutorial series I would try to show ways around it's weaknesses for the student as well... every program has weaknesses but that doesn't mean the advice should simply be "it can't be done" just because it's complex.

For people who are not inclined to buy or use 3DCoat that demo has alot of value... if you are only needing to do a few models once in a while, saving several hundred dollars and a steep learning curve is worthwhile -- if this is a big part of your daily workflow then maybe not.

But many people will try to get the most they can out of ZBrush simply because it's what they own and what they know.

For my money you can't beat Mari for texture painting and that's where I would go if it was a big part of my daily workflow... this was only a small feature of my tutorial series which focuses more on sculpting and painting Sub-D meshes (as is typical of ZBrush).

Best,
Jason.

[Polyxo]

I did not think of your Training Series as I wrote - so in that context such a Workflow makes better sense of course.

Mari again could not impress me that much thus far. It is of course extremely capable in terms of dealing with huge, huge
amounts of data. But everything I saw thus far looks overly complicated and clumsy to me.
Certainly the best and even only choice for highly specialized Industries but not at all inviting to me.
For my limited needs I come along quite nicely with 3DCoat which of course is far from perfect too.

[Hervé]

3DCoat Rocks...