I've been hard at work trying to finished this little project this weekend, and all was going well, at least in ZBrush. Here is my current progress. It is more or less finished, but there are some serious problems when it came to exporting the polypaint textures for Maya...
The green parts are parts that share UV space with their opposite counterpart, and thus do not require texturing. I coloured them green to make sure that I remembered this when it came to exporting, in attempt to avoid unwanted artefacts.
So here is an example of an issue that I've found all over the model when exporting the textures:
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| Apron Mesh as seen on the front of the Soma Yukihira model above. |
On the left, you can see the direct result of going through the usual paces to export the polypaint as a texture map. On the right is the result that I expected, where the texture fills the entire UV space provided for the mesh. This annoyed the hell out of me when it was happening, but I soon found out why.
The following image shows 2 meshes. The left one is the one that I had worked on, The right one was the new mesh created to fix the problem.
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| Morph UVs button |
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| Apron Mesh inside ZBrush with Morph UVs applied. |
Using the 'Morph UVs' button in ZBrush, this clearly showed me that the original mesh had had its UVs smoothed while subdividing the mesh; something that surely no one would want to have happen...
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| Evil Smooth UVs! |
The check-box that caused all this mess is here in the Geometry tab, called 'Suv', for 'Smooth UVs'. Is must be disabled when adding subdivisions to the mesh. Now I must go back through my model, creating a new mesh above each current mesh, subdivide it with this button unchecked, and then project the original detail to them. It has to be done this way, as simply updating the mesh will automatically subdivide again with this option still checked...
