Retoplogizing Dense Meshes And Exporting Normal Maps Back To Maya

[james-thompson--2]

With Zbrush 3.0 and Maya workflow, you make your base mesh in Maya, export it to Zbrush, work on it to a higher resolution and then turn it into a Normal and Displacement Map...then you retopologize the mesh to make it into a simpler polygon mesh that Maya can handle (the mesh has been seriously changed by sculpting too and thus you need a new topology to take the Normal map).

And of course with Maya 2009 you can create a Photoshop to PSD network.

So you'll have to create a UV map for the new retopologized mesh and plug in the Mudbox generated Normal/Displacement Maps. Creating UV maps in Mudbox? Retopologizing in Mudbox the way you did in Zbrush?

Is there a good tutorial anywhere on the correct proceedure for all this?

Hmmm...I just watched a video on this...

[daikath]

You can go down in levels in mudbox, it will still preserve all the editing and details from the higher levels. But you can export that geometry back into Maya, then you uvmap it, and you can import just the uv's under File -> import uv and it will just import uv coordinates from the file you select onto a current mesh.

Retopologise your mesh in Maya manually, there is no way to do that automatically. But you can bring it back into mudbox as the mesh it will use to make your normal and displacement maps.

Just use your new retopologised mesh as the target mesh.