So, i’ve been working on really getting knowledgeable with Zbrush now that it’s fully mac compatible(could never get tablet pressure sensitivity to work with parallels)

One thing that’s different are the palettes for UVs and maps. So after a lot of work trying to get the seams to not show up, i finally got the workflow down for texturing in Zbrush and import into EIAS. (luckily i was working on a personal project and not a clients, so i didn’t have the deadline looming to freak me out)

You will need obj2Fact if you don’t have it already. Right now, all the Zapps and scripts and plug-ins haven’t been ported to OSX yet, so no displacement exporter yet....

anyways, the following workflow works for texture maps and normal maps

-Create your base mesh in Silo or whatever modeller you like. You can create UVs in Silo or use the free app UVMapper for OSX.

-Import obj file into Zbrush with UVs.

-Do your sculpting and polypainting.

-Export mesh at lowest subd level that is smooth enough for you, make sure texture is set to on in the texture palette or OBJ2fact will crash...

-Export maps
a. For normal maps, switch to lowest subd level, set tangent, smoothuv and adaptive to ON in the normal map palette

b. For texture maps switch to highest subd level. In the UV palette,make sure UV border overpaint is set to 16, then export (16 was the first setting I tried that eliminated the seams in my textures in EIAS, feel free to experiment)


-Run OBJ file through OBJ2FACT, make sure in the materials section that all three UV options are checked. Also Flip z should be checked if you haven’t set up Zbrush’s import/export options(I haven’t had time to play with those yet)

-Import .fac model into animator. Load textures and rotate the textures y and z 180 degrees. Make sure that the model is to UVs in the info window.

that should work...atleast it does for me...so far…

Great Job. This should be very helpful to many. Do you have any images of the results? Screenshots.

Thanks i will give it a drive as soon as it is available for Mac(Trial Version).

Your welcome! 

Glad to be helpful for once, instead of helped…

I’m still trying to get the specular to break up like a real apple, working on the maps now...i’ll post a link to an animation when it’s done…

here’s a snapshot…

rendering the animation soon…

that looks great. Where’s the seams?

ZB3 has so many uses on so many levels. One of the best tools out there.

thanks!

Yeah, I definitely like using zbrush without parallels, nowi just have to wait for all the scripts and plug-ins to be made available…

Yes, I gave in Parallels for VMWare fusion on my MacPro, but they I moved to straight BootCamp on my MacBook Pro and iMac. The performance is great, especially Zmapper which I never got to work in emulators.

So, just to be clear. ZMapper is already in ZB3 OSX? No need to wait on plugins or scripts?

No Zmapper yet, but texture and normal maps are exportable right form their own sub-palettes, i haven’t really tried the displacement maps yet, but they have a sub-palette too. it looks to be the same process.

Somewhere I heard there’s no more zMapper and that it’s somehow built in. I’m sure tho, I have to look into it more.
I ask on ZBC, I was just double checking.