Attached Link: http://www.users.on.net/~pkinnane/ZBrush%20Tutorial/Poser-ZBrush%20Tutorial.html

Hi You've probably seen a couple of people around (Richardson, Uwe, ODF, myself) that are posting renders in the galleries that have been tweaked with ZBrush2 (like the one above). The attached link shows a workflow for doing this. give me a yell if you have any problems with it.

Image referred to in msg1

Looks good so far. Close to what you sent me earlier, except for the pictures. I must confess I haven't tried it yet. I wanted to do morphs, so I used dburdick's workflow, which bypasses UVMapper, but uses Pozer's Little Helper (PLH) to produce a full body morph from a modified .obj. Way cool, in principle. Unfortunately, ZBrush trashed the group names several times for me (although, oddly, not always), so adding UVMapper to the mix seems like a good idea. Save the body part info, then restore it later if necessary. By the way, for producing morphs it's better to use the original .obj file instead of one exported from Poser, because you have a consecutive mesh then, which is much easier to edit, and PLH is still happy with it.

Yep - Dave's method is way better for doing morphs. This workflow is more built around doing one-of mesh tweaks than morphs. The advantage is that you tweak the mesh in it's posed state (rather than the zero'd pose).

ZB2 should always corrupt your groups, since it puts all vertices into a single group. But PLH is smart enough to not need the group info. As long as the vertices haven't been reordered, it will be fine. I'm guessing that doing any sort of subd/cage could potentially reorder the vertices, so maybe that's what's causing your problem (in which case, uvmapper won't help you - since it will come up with the same error as PLH).

Message edited on: 10/12/2005 00:31

Olaf - just looking at this again - if you are using PLH, you cannot use the ZB2 autogroups button. If you do, you can use uvmapper to reassign the group - then load the morph mesh into PLH.

I use both workflows, Daves for morphinjections and Pauls for correcting the bad joints i can not morph away with the PLH method after posing. Subdividing works well with PLH, but you have to go back to subd1 before exporting, so the subd detail-advantage is lost anyway. For small details subd and create a displacement map is fine...

Where can i find this "dburdick's workflow" please? :)

face_off, thanks a lot for the tutorial. I started with Zbrush little ago, and so far i am just getting the hand of it, making small props, but my final aim is really texturing and morph targets.

Attached Link: http://www.skinvue.net/Tutorials/PoserZbrushTutorial.pdf

Dave's workflow above. Important : You MUST have the figure in the zero'd pose when you morph then for this system to work (regardless of what the tutorial says).

Paul, thanks for posting this. I'm not feeling up to trying it all out for real yet, but a quick test of the 'workflow' went well.

Guida, you can find Dave's workflow in the tutorial section here :
http://www.skinvue.net/

Thanks a lot guys! :)

Here's a little addendum: ZB2 doesn't like Jessi's mesh, so it subdivides some faces, causing UVMapper to choke later on. I'm enclosing a Python script which fixed that for me, and actually made the UVMapper steps superfluous. Just rename the attached file to combine.py and run it on the original Poser export and the .obj produced by ZB2, piping the output to a new file that can be imported into Poser. I haven't tested this extensively, so there may be hidden quirks, but so far, it works like a charm. Let me know what you think. Oh, and this must be run from the command line, not from Poser. For instructions, look into the file.

Olaf - that is genious! No more reloading uv's, etc. A huge simplification in the process. It would be an easy mod to run it from P6, and also delete the old prop, and reload the new one. Will check it out when I get time next week. Will also update the tutorial when I get time....Thanks a heap.

In fact - it could be a pretty easy mod to simply read the moulded mesh into P6 using a python script - and have it just read vertex position and update them on the prop.