ZBRUSH PolyPaint Resolution Tests for SecondLife Modelling

[Toysoldier Thor]

For those SL Creators of 3D mesh models that use the Zbrush modelling tool, my recent set of detailed tests I did to better understand the impacts of polypainting LOD resolution as well as SL's handling of imported texture resolutions might be of interest to you.

Today I performed a set of tests which I created a detailed blog posting of all the results from my model texture resolutions when using ZBrush to polypaint a a range of polygon densities from really low to extremely high.  You can read all the details at the link below:

 

http://toytalks.weebly.com/1/post/2013/01/zbrush-polypaint-resolution-tests-for-secondlife-mesh.html

 

For those that just want to read my conclusions and don't care about actual example from the tests, following is a clip of my conclusions:

 

1. When ZBrush PolyPainting for an SL destined mesh model, try to make the top LOD where polypainting will be applied to about 1.5 million polygons - just be safe.
2. Make sure when building the model's structure not to have sharp / dramatic changes of the polycounts unless its in an areas that the texture cannot see the resulting distortions.  The densities do not have to be evenly distributed (although preferred) but if the densities change, it should be done gradually.
3. Its proven again that there is no value creating a UV Texture map greater than 1024x1024 for SL destined models.  In fact, I even tried increasing the native DPI from 75 to 300 and it also had no noticed differences.

Hope you fellow Zbrush'ers find the information helpful.