Technically possible, yes. But it depends on how many polys you will be importing and what kind of hardware you have if you can actually work with large amounts of data in the viewport.
In general max works best when millions of polys are split across many objects. If its all stuffed into one object, max tends to slow down quite a bit more.
After you import your high poly it can be helpful to turn the visual display to "bounding box" (select your high poly object(s) right click, object properties, check on bounding box. It will still render properly but won't chug the viewport quite as hard.
I think the OP's question is specifically about importing Polypaint into 3dsmax to bake. Unfortunately I don't know of anyway to do this. Although I wish i did.
I'm just throwing that out there, I've been looking for something like this as well, will need to try it.
I don't know if it's even possible, here's a guess:
-Unwrap your ZBrush mesh, the one you sculpted on
-Generate the texture map in ZBrush
-Export your ZBrush model
-Import it in 3ds max and apply the texture
-Then use RTT to bake.
...actually, I will try it right away, if it's really dumb someone please stop me heh
Hey! Thanks for so many replies! I thought I pointed the problem pretty clear though nyx702 was the first to understand it right.
I am talking about an option in xNormals "bake highpoly's vertex color".
I thought there would be some script or plugin or smth to make this possible. Using xnoramls is ok yet I hate its cage modifying system. I make cage in max and then import it to xnormals.
Thanks! And thanks for tutorial theslingshot - the problem is that unwrapping highpoly model in Zbrush is not very suitable for me and time consuming.
That is pretty awesome theslingshot. Thanks for putting that together. I knew that this could be done but didn't think about using Goz to transfer the texture with it. I'll be giving this a shot.
the problem is that unwrapping highpoly model in Zbrush is time consuming.
It's like 1 button click dude. I am not sure how much faster you can get. It doesn't matter what the unwrap looks like. Its throw away work. It's undoubtedly faster than exporting to Xnormal just for baking the vert colors.
It might take a while if you have millions on polygons, but still it's just a click, it does it by itself.
You can even lighten your mesh with decimation master and "Keep Borders" and "Keep UVs" to make it faster and easier to work with within 3ds max afterward.
Yep, exactly. Max should be able to read OBJ files containing Polypaint info - NO TEXTURE! - and bake the vertex color onto a low poly textured object.
But you can do it in Zbrush by:
1. polypainting a hipoly and make a retopo from it
2. import retopo into Max, fine-tune the Unwrap as you want
3. import back the UV-d lowpoly into ZBrush, add a new texture to it with the NEW button
4. append the lowpoly to the hipoly via subtool menu
5. do a Project All--projecting polypaint to the lowpoly model that has UV and texture.
6. Export the nice new baked texture = polypaint data from the hipoly for use in Photoshop.
yeah , but for lots of objects that tends to become way too much work , it would be perfect if you could just simply import the polypaint , it would be literally two clicks , one to export everthing thru subtool master, then one for a max script to import multiple objs. done.
heres hoping a tech artist can create an obj importer that reads vertex paint from Zed
just to think all this could be simplified if 3ds max obj importer read zbrush vertex colors...Xnormal does it, why cant 3ds max do it ?
So .OBJ is actually quite a dated format now, and alot of programs want to store information in it that it just wasn't designed for. Vertex colour is the best example of this.
By default, .OBJ's do not store vertex colour. Zbrush actually has a hacky way to stick the colour information in the file, and then it knows how to read it out. But other 3d programs have their own hacky way of doing it - there is no standard! If you open an .OBJ with vertex colour in notepad, you can actually see the block of 'text' zbrush uses to store colour, and if you opened an OBJ. with vcol from another app, you might see a different looking block somewhere else in the document.
The two best workaround I have found for this are: Firstly, export from zBrush in a format designed for vcol. zBrush has a 3d printing export plugin that lets you save a model as .STL (you want binary .STL). If you want to convert filetypes in another app, .PLY is also good at storing vcols, especially in really high poly meshes, as it doesn't save much else and is a very 'minimalist' filetype.
secondly, use a program to bake that is more comfortable with Vertex colours. Hello, Xnormal!
There is a script to actually import the ZBrush Sculpt with Polypaint into 3DSMax (ZBRush made its own modifs to the .obj format and saves the vertex color info in it). Use this script (I just tried, it works fine with Max2017) : http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/polypaint Just for info, using 3DCoat you can import the ZBRush high poly from the Sculpt section (waaaaaaay faster than Max and polypaint is compatible), load a retopo mesh or do it from there. And then bake. 3DCoat automatically transfers highpoly details and polypaint info into normal map and albedo/color texture layers. So you can import the polypaint in Max.... with a script. You can render it. But you can't bake it. Max is good but way younger apps are lighter, faster, way more user friendly and do everything fingers in the nose.
Replies
Just look up render to texture (3dsmax)
and you can bake one or multiple types of textures.
and decimation master (zbrush)
to lower the poly count down so you can import into max
In general max works best when millions of polys are split across many objects. If its all stuffed into one object, max tends to slow down quite a bit more.
After you import your high poly it can be helpful to turn the visual display to "bounding box" (select your high poly object(s) right click, object properties, check on bounding box. It will still render properly but won't chug the viewport quite as hard.
http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2009help/index.html?url=Shading_Nodes_Vertex_Bake_Set.htm,topicNumber=d0e548969
The OP's question was about Max not Maya.
I don't know if it's even possible, here's a guess:
-Unwrap your ZBrush mesh, the one you sculpted on
-Generate the texture map in ZBrush
-Export your ZBrush model
-Import it in 3ds max and apply the texture
-Then use RTT to bake.
...actually, I will try it right away, if it's really dumb someone please stop me heh
GJ on the tutorial btw
I am talking about an option in xNormals "bake highpoly's vertex color".
I thought there would be some script or plugin or smth to make this possible. Using xnoramls is ok yet I hate its cage modifying system. I make cage in max and then import it to xnormals.
Thanks! And thanks for tutorial theslingshot - the problem is that unwrapping highpoly model in Zbrush is not very suitable for me and time consuming.
It's like 1 button click dude. I am not sure how much faster you can get. It doesn't matter what the unwrap looks like. Its throw away work. It's undoubtedly faster than exporting to Xnormal just for baking the vert colors.
You can even lighten your mesh with decimation master and "Keep Borders" and "Keep UVs" to make it faster and easier to work with within 3ds max afterward.
But you can do it in Zbrush by:
1. polypainting a hipoly and make a retopo from it
2. import retopo into Max, fine-tune the Unwrap as you want
3. import back the UV-d lowpoly into ZBrush, add a new texture to it with the NEW button
4. append the lowpoly to the hipoly via subtool menu
5. do a Project All--projecting polypaint to the lowpoly model that has UV and texture.
6. Export the nice new baked texture = polypaint data from the hipoly for use in Photoshop.
Voila!
heres hoping a tech artist can create an obj importer that reads vertex paint from Zed
So .OBJ is actually quite a dated format now, and alot of programs want to store information in it that it just wasn't designed for. Vertex colour is the best example of this.
By default, .OBJ's do not store vertex colour. Zbrush actually has a hacky way to stick the colour information in the file, and then it knows how to read it out. But other 3d programs have their own hacky way of doing it - there is no standard! If you open an .OBJ with vertex colour in notepad, you can actually see the block of 'text' zbrush uses to store colour, and if you opened an OBJ. with vcol from another app, you might see a different looking block somewhere else in the document.
The two best workaround I have found for this are: Firstly, export from zBrush in a format designed for vcol. zBrush has a 3d printing export plugin that lets you save a model as .STL (you want binary .STL). If you want to convert filetypes in another app, .PLY is also good at storing vcols, especially in really high poly meshes, as it doesn't save much else and is a very 'minimalist' filetype.
secondly, use a program to bake that is more comfortable with Vertex colours.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/polypaint
Just for info, using 3DCoat you can import the ZBRush high poly from the Sculpt section (waaaaaaay faster than Max and polypaint is compatible), load a retopo mesh or do it from there. And then bake. 3DCoat automatically transfers highpoly details and polypaint info into normal map and albedo/color texture layers.
So you can import the polypaint in Max.... with a script. You can render it. But you can't bake it. Max is good but way younger apps are lighter, faster, way more user friendly and do everything fingers in the nose.