Rigged Multiple Face Mesh from Zbrush to Blender to SL problem.

[Hikaru Yamamoto]

Hi guys, I've been trying to work on making one piece mesh rigged avatars with multple textures in SL. I'm really stuck.

I use Zbrush to create the avatar and textures, then I bring it into Blender and rig and export. But recently I have been wanting to add more than one texture to boost quality. I found a way to do it in Zbrush but it only works if I export from Zbrush.

Once I save it as an object and import into Blender and rig it and then export it, it looses some information. When I import it into SL the multiple faces appear to be there but I cannot select them. When I add on a texture, it adds correctly to the one face but also adds it to the other face... So I cannot seem to get both textures onto the one mesh object.

I am willing to use other problems to get this right.

Any help is greatly appreciated thanks.

[Rahkis Andel]

Edit: I don't think what I wrote made a lick of sense so let me try that again.

I suggest bringing your ZBrush sculpt into Blender, retopologizing it, UV unwrapping it and texturing it there. That way you'll have more control over your topology and different LODs.

And yeah, also do what Gaia said below. Perfect timing.

[Gaia Clary]

Your description sounds like you have mangled your UV maps. I am not sure if this helps, but maybe you can get somewhat inspired by this video (it is about how to get separate textures on one mesh with blender)

[Hikaru Yamamoto]

I found a way... sorta... I loaded each part separately and then assigned each a material then joined them together and that seems to work almost perfectly cept for one thing... there is a large seam where I joined the two mesh together.  The normals are not smoothed on that spot. I clicked normals/ recalculate outside and that doesn't seem to affect it at all.

[Gaia Clary]

You probably just need to remove double vertices along the seams:

select the mesh., then press "w" -> remove doubles

[WhiteRabbit0]

You need multiple materials to do multiple textures, otherwise it's all a single map and you only get 1 tex slot.

You will also have to create multiple UV maps for each part of your retopoed mesh, this involves retopoing your original sculpt, then cutting it up and UV mapping each piece seperately... then setting each to a different material in your final retopologized export.

I really wanted to stress this, please please retopologize Zbrush models before import into SL

Straight Zbrush sculpts kill SL, cause lag and crash viewers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0tdLwR0P0&NR=1&feature=endscreen.

Research it thoroughly and repost here if you have any questions please.

[Rucy Byron]

Hi

 

I had the same problem, you need to apply materials to the 'subgroups' from zbrush, here is a link to the thread I started, should help a lot

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Keeping-faces-intact-on-rigged-model/td-p/1941239

[Hikaru Yamamoto]

The only problem I have now is the normals, they don't blend at the seam where the differnet materials are seperated.

[Hikaru Yamamoto]

Aaargh I finally got it right haha, thanks for all the help guys.