Transferring Morphs to Character Sculpted in Hexagon/Zbrush/Mudbox

Collective3d

Hey gang!

So I have successfully figured out how to export Genesis out to Mudbox (my weapon of choice), sculpt on him, import him back to Daz, and restore the rigging so he can be posed.

But I'm having difficulty figuring out how to reassign the morph controls for things like facial expressions, dialing up weight, etc. I'm sure I'm overlooking something simple.

It there a tutorial floating around, or some words of advice, that you'd be willing to share?

Thanks!

Richard Haseltine

Are you creating a morph or a new figure?

Collective3d

That's interesting. I hadn't considered importing it as a morph. That's something I would have to look up the process for.

Right now, I have a proof of concept character (basically just a couple minutes of sculpting some rough ridges on a Genesis character) that I've imported back into Daz as a new figure, and rigged using the Transfer Utility.

Importing the new shape as a morph sounds like it would be a better way to go, though. Any tips on that while I look up the process?

Collective3d

I think I got it. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Richard Haseltine

Morphs are limited to the base mesh, allowing only the repositioning of the existing vertices. If you've added details by subdividing in ZBrush then it won't work as a morph (though you could use displacement to recover them). Using the ZBrush link, and not dividing the mesh (or resetting it to the base resolution before returning) should offer to create a new morph on returning. You should either not smooth when dividing in ZBrush (SMTH off) or save a morph target before dividing as the smoothing routine mangles the teeth, and the fingers to an extent, when you go back to the base resolution.

Presumably you are suing the Transfer utility to rig your current modification? If so you can also use it to transfer morphs, by expanding the More Options button. You won't be able to do a simple export/import of the base morphs if you've changed the resolution of the mesh, just as you can't apply the changed mesh as a morph to the base Genesis.

Richard Haseltine

Ah, glad you have it sorted - ignore the foregoing then :)

Collective3d

Still quite helpful! Once I figure out how to get Genesis's UVs to import properly into Mudbox I shouldn't have a problem creating combinations of morphs and displacements using subdivisions. Right now Mudbox seems to only be importing the face UVs and applying those over the entire body, but admittedly I haven't looked too deeply into it. I'm too jazzed about the morph thing right now :P

Thanks again for your help!

Richard Haseltine

It's probably having trouble with the way the DAZ figures use multiple maps, which of course occupy the same UV unit square and so cause problems if there's no way of assigning different map sets to different materials. This is a big issue in ZBrush, though fortunately there are workarounds (either scaling and moving the unit UV squares to different parts of a single non-overlapping mapping, then cutting the exported maps up into their constituent parts - which would probably be a fix in Mudbox too - or converting only selected areas of the mesh to a map at one time).

Collective3d

Yeah, a quick peek at the UV view in Mudbox shows that all the maps are piled on top of each other. I'll look into a workaround for that eventually, as it would be nice to have access to higher resolution displacement maps.

Richard Haseltine

If you can adjust the mapping to get the different sets (each leading digit in a surface name marks a different set) on different UV Tiles then this http://download.autodesk.com/us/mudbox/help2010/files/WS1a9193826455f5ff-4f6d1f1d11d24be3e03-ff5.htm looks like it should help. But presuamably you need a suitable modeller to do the map reorganisation.