maya zbrush hard surface workflow
Hello friends,
I am really going to freak out because of this workflow. The main problem is how to keep harder edges, while maintaining evenly distributed polygons. I watched tens of tutorials, read guides etc about this topic but i cant figured it out exactly. I need some really good hints. For example last night i watched a tutorial about preserving the hard edges with the crease tool in zbrush. It really worked well in zbrush. I did my sculpting exactly like what i want but the problem occured in the maya part. When i exported my creased low level object in maya , put disp map on it, created mr approximation etc. render was horrible. Here my workflow with pictures;
Zbrush everything looks fine;
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My polygroups with creases around them in Zbrush looks fine too;
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And this is the bad Maya Render;
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Also here are some of the workflows i tried in this hard surface sculpting situation and didnt get any good results;
1-It is so much easier to use edge loops to define my hard(ish) edges. Out of the box, this method doesn't work with ZBrush very well, because you end up with unevenly distributed geometry.
2-I have experimented with turning smooth off when subdividing the mesh for the first couple of times, but sometimes it leads to hard edges (or sudden transitions in surface) in places where I didn't mean to have them. Also this method affects all the visible hard edges on the object so you cant decide which edges you want to keep hard on your own.
3-The last method is the method i told in the above paragraph; polygroups with creases.
I am really looking for your tips and tricks. Thank you in advance.
i think you should check this out...http://vimeo.com/9473973
To preserve hard edges you can either add control loops close to the edges the mesh that you want them stay hard when subdivided or you can import using the the SmoothGroup Import plugin for ZBrush (though its not availiable for Z4 yet)
Hope that helps
this method doesn't work with ZBrush very well, because you end up with unevenly distributed geometry.
have you checked my link above? its by far the most practical
yes i checked it and ill try it. it looks good. thank you strontium.











Nvm I see what it's doing now.... Delete history. freeze transforms. export it out as an OBJ then reopen it. it seems like it's exploding the models based off of your poly groups. first i've seen this so i'm not honestly sure what'll fix it.
Also what did your base mesh look like?