Hey all, I was wondering what a good workflow to follow is when using both Maya and ZBrush when it comes to characters and skeletal meshes. What would be most comfortable for me is to just do the base in Maya, then move it over to ZBrush, and then (probably) bring it back in again. I can use both programs fine on their own, but to be honest I’m kind of lost when it comes to using both of them together. With static meshes I have no issue, but when it comes to a character rig I have no clue what I should do. Let’s say you have a base character rigged up in Maya and you want to polish it in ZBrush or Mudbox. Do you have to re-import it into Maya and then re-skin it every time you finalize an edit in ZBrush? Or is there an easier way of going about this? Is there a generally-accepted solution to this?
Yes, you would bring in a base from Maya in the shape of the rig you’re going to use (in your case the ART default I guess), in Zbrush sculpt everything, bring the sculpted version back to Maya, retopo so the low poly fits the sculpted model better (or just retopo the sculpt to a new low poly mesh), skin the new low poly, add UV seams and unwrap, then bake the high poly information to the low poly mesh using XNormal or Substance or whatever you’re using. Then if you want to change the sculpted mesh you can just redo the texture baking step. You’ll only need to re-skin if you make huge changes to the mesh, and in that case you would retopo - skin - unwrap again.
Thanks for the reply, I’ve got most of it down now! If you wouldn’t mind answering a question of mine, I’m a bit lost when it comes to re-sculpting the base mesh (as you can guess I’m kind of new to the art side of things :p). For our game, we have some blend shapes set up, and as far as I know sending meshes into ZBrush from Maya gets rid of all that info. How can I reimport/replace the mesh in Maya after modifying it in ZBrush without losing the skeleton/blend shape data?
You don’t, the only thing you would bring back from the Zbrush model should be textures. If you want the original mesh to resemble the sculpted mesh (instead of doing retopo of the sculpted mesh) you can do that with some kind of face snapping, snapping the faces/vertices of the low poly mesh to the sculpted version.
Ohh, that sounds much better then. But if do not bring the model back from ZBrush to Maya, how will I set its skeleton and blend shapes?
(Sorry again for the noob questions, I swear I’ve tried searching this up )
You don’t have to worry about skeletons, blend shapes or UVs for the sculpted version, you will use a material to add the normal map baked from the sculpted high poly mesh to your low poly mesh in UE4. The skeleton and blend shapes should only be needed on the low poly mesh. You will need to set up the UVs on the low poly mesh so you’ve got something you can bake into, then load both meshes and bake from the high poly mesh to the low poly mesh, whatever textures you need. Usually normal and ambient occlusion.
I’m assuming you’re sculpting to add details though, is this right or are you just sculpting the mesh and want to keep the same vertex count? I don’t really know if that’s what you usually do in Zbrush but it’s possible in Blender so I guess it should be in Zbrush too.
)