Maya to Mudbox and back to maya
 

Hi guys,

Sorry if this has been asked before but I have modelled a Trex in Maya and plan to bring it in Mudbox to add more details, I have already done the UV mapping.

Now the thing is I plan to animate this character as well so do I first rig this character in the low cage model before bringing it to Mudbox? I just want to know the work flow.

Cheers :beer:

The main thing to do before you get into any rigging is get your uvs laid out. Once the uv's are done most begin texturing and sculpting and do the rigging last. There are other options as some will texture and sculpt in zbrush after modeling as zbrush does not need a uv map so this can be set up later. Also there are scripts that will enable you to transfer the uvs to an already rigged model without messing up the history.
I think the main workflow used be most is this though

Model, UV, Texture/Sculpt and then rig.

Good luck

HI leon,

Thanks for the reply really appreaciate it. I did not know that in Zbrush that you can bring in a mesh and uv mapping can be done there?

Cause I followed one tutorial for Mudbox where they bought in a model from Maya to it and the model had the UVs done in Maya.

I plan to just do the texturing in Mudbox, I just hope I dont end up with too high resolution on my mesh when I import in back in maya.

Thanks again!

Hi tahsin1982,

Well you can lay out the uvs with zbrush but I prefer to lay them out with a separate app called headus. I then tweak the uvs to get them exactly right but headus helps speed the whole process up greatly.
Zbrush does not rely on uvs as instead of painting onto a uv'd model you are polypainting. Because of this you have to subdivide your mesh a about 6-7 times in order to be able to get the details in your texture map. You can then either layout the uvs in zbrush or export the model at its lowest level to do the uvs elsewhere. When you then re-import the uv'd mesh into zbrush the new uv's will be transferred to your model allowing you to export the texture map. Mudbox is better in my opinion with regards to high res texturing though as you are not held back by the polypaint option and can paint a high res texture onto a low res model.
With regards to having a high res mesh when you go back into maya there are a number of ways to solve this.
1st of you want to make sure the mesh you rig has a good amount of poly's to work with. If you have a mega low base mesh you will probably want to be working with the sculpt you create in mudbox at 1 subdivision for the rigging.
In order to use all of the details you will be sculpting such as scales etc there are a few options.
You could export the high res sculpt and set it up as a wrap deformer so it is driven by the low res mesh. This would probably not be the best method though as you will have a lot of geometry and it will make maya very unstable.
The other option is to export either a normal or displacement map. If you have not heard of these they are textures which you can plug into your shaders in Maya. I personally prefer to work with normal maps, they are simply plugged into your bump node on your shader. You will need to set it up as tangent space normals though.
Displacement maps achieve more detail but the render times can be very excessive with Maya and mental ray. I know others such as vray and renderman can chuck out the renders much faster but I found mental ray to suck at calculating them. That said it was a long time ago I last used them with mental ray so it may be a lot faster now.

Hope this info helps you on your way and best of luck.

HI Leon,

I never heard of headus but it does sound interesting cause sometimes UV mapping in Maya can just make me call it quits


I was playing around with my model in Mudbox last night for fun and was sculpting at level 3 actually and when i exported it back in Maya, maya could not handle it and crashed just like you said.

I will try your second opinion and do more research on this (still getting around in mudbox slowly) :) Thank you once again for the info I have a learnt a lot.

>>>the other option is to export either a normal or displacement map. If you have not heard of these they are textures which you can plug into your shaders in Maya. I personally prefer to work with normal maps, they are simply plugged into your bump node on your shader. You will need to set it up as tangent space normals though.
Displacement maps achieve more detail but the render times can be very excessive with Maya and mental ray<<<


:beer: