ZBrush to Blender Workflow - Using GoB

hey guys martin henning from philip normals here and in today's video we're taking you through a workflow between c brush and blender using the go blender add-on and we'll also be showing you a few tips on how to optimize your project when you're going between the two and generally good practices when exporting and importing into blender so this is very exciting so let's jump into blender and crush so the first part of this video we're just going to do the boring thing that everyone hates in all videos is we're going to show you how to actually install this now if you don't want to watch this just click the chapter marker to go where we actually start using the the add-on so first off follow the link in the description that goes to this github just click on code and download the sip now all the instructions are also on this kit if you want to run through them i found them a little confusing the first time i read through them so that's why we're doing this video now so after everything's downloaded you just install this like any other blender add-on go to edit preferences and then you just hit install and find the directory now after you've done that search for dob it's gonna pop up in your add-ons simply enable it and if you don't have auto save preferences on just hit save preferences now one thing you'll notice is if you expand this you're going to have a few settings and you might want to play around with this depending on the kind of workflow that you you're doing for me i'll just leave everything at default especially for the import but you might not want poly paint to be written to your objects for example so you have control over that from within this menu now after it's enabled two new ui menus have been added export and import and in order to set everything up correctly what you're first gonna have to do is just get an object or something and then hit export upon first export this is gonna open a dialog box and it'll send everything or set everything up correctly to zbrush it'll find the cbrush folder with the pixel logic folder and you just choose the version that you want for me 21 zbrush and now everything's been set up correctly now once i hit export again let's maybe take a more exciting object like a sphere like this hit export again this is now going to be sent over to zbrush and there we go now this has been imported into zbrush and we can make changes like like we normally would here like that now in order to get it back into blender again if this is your first setup and if you've never worked with go z before which is the default plugin in zbrush simply hit this key over here which is go c if you've never pressed it before this r here is the dialog for it if i press this and i've never done it this dialog box is going to pop up now you can see blender is selected blender might not pop up in in the wizard that is presented to you in the beginning just go through it doesn't matter blender will be registered anyway so just click there and then we'll hit go z go back to blender and now hit the import button and now once the import button is active it's sort of constantly listening for for an update to the model you can disable this if you don't want it to be listening all the time but this just sort of ensures a a live link if you will okay so now let's look at this add-on in in action with an actual project so this here is from an upcoming video where we show you how to sculpt skull kit with majora's mask on it so definitely keep an eye out for that but let's say we wanted to do some tweaks to something like the mask for example let's select the mask and let's isolate it so we just look at this so the way go z or go b in this case will work is that it'll look at your object and if there's poly paint or textures connected to it it will export that and it will also export from the lowest subdivision level so in my case this is what's going to be exported so let's just give it a shot hit go z again it'll go through all the sub tools because i'm just hitting go c if you hit all it will actually export all of them and visible is just for the visible sub tools head back over to blender hit import and now you can see your object appears let's just change the viewport and you can see that it has the textures applied to it already now if your object doesn't have textures but it has poly paint this is a very common workflow as well where maybe you just want something quick into blender and you don't necessarily want to give it uvs and and set everything up first poly paint is a great way to go head over to the shading tab let's just disconnect this control right mouse button drag and now we're going to create an attribute node so hit shift a search att attribute now this attribute node will just look for an attribute a general attribute within blender where we specify a name so for this we're wanting to look at vertex color data and the vertex collider from cbrush has a very specific name so if you go to the object data go to vertex color you can see it comes in with the attribute name col with a capital k this is case sensitive so just keep that in mind so we'll just call this course not kolc oil sorry drag this back into base color and now you can see that it's applied our poly paint instead of our texture data just to show you the difference there you go now obviously the texture data is higher res because the subdivision level that we brought this in was pretty low and it being vertex colors you know it's each vertex is assigned a color value so the higher risk your meshes the higher res your polypaint or vertex color data is going to be now let's just do a couple more just to solidify this workflow i guess so let's take the eyes for example and now these eyes let's have a quick look there are three subdivision levels what we could do is simply just delete the lower levels let's say we wanted the high res part in there with more resolution for the the poly paint just delete that because now we have more geometry hit go c back into blender and because import is enabled it'll be constantly looking for the the path where it sends the meshes to to be updated so now we have that in here and we can do the same thing with attribute here call and simply drag this in and now this is going to have the vertex color data from the poly pane now there's not going to be much of a difference because this is the highest level that was also painted on with the texture map but at least this case was something creepy to look at now one of the key issues with this particular workflow it's well it's not an issue per se it's just the way that it's designed so all of these textures that are connected to the object not the poly paint the poly paint lives within the actual mesh but the textures they are exported into into a directory this is a zbrush created directory and if we just connect this again we'll do that here as well if you come over to your color map or whatever map is exported open it you can see that it's being sent into the public pixel logic directory and this is where all of the textures actually live now you could let's say this this project for example i think i have something like 18 or maybe 20 sub tools i don't want to have to move all of these so what i would do normally is save my scene to start with and create a workflow folder let's see let's call this majora so now it's saved in my majora folder and you go to file external data and pack all into blend i'll just save it again so now everything all the textures have been packed into this blender file which is great now you can share it with people but maybe if you want to get this out into a project path what you can do as well go back into external data and say unpack all into files select the first option use files in current directory create when necessary so right now they don't exist in that directory we create it and this creates a texture folder now in this very messy project folder you can see we now have a texture folder and our major blend file file like before and now our textures have been exported into here ignore the duplicate that was from a later test or a previous test but now all the the maps have been exported into here and this is an excellent way to sort of quickly organize your project if you want to do this in one go i'm not going to do this because i have like 10 million polys in here and it's going to be pretty heavy to export over you can just hit the all button this is going to send all of your sub tools into blender with the textures that are connected you do the exact same thing within blender you pack the data you save it you unpack the data and now all of your textures are going to be living in the same directory as your blend file it's a super fast way and i think probably one of the most efficient ways to work between blender and zbrush so what if you want more control or if you have a very specific way that you want to export stuff or maybe you don't have access to to blender or you're doing something else that doesn't have go c like in vfx for example this was an issue for us because we were operating on windows devices and our main device would be a linux machine so we couldn't send between the two devices if that's the case for you you can export stuff as an oh sorry as an fbx for example so let's select another object here let's take these spikes now these have texture data as well but with the fbx what we're going to do in this case is we're going to be exporting poly paint because poly paint can be baked into an fbx file now if this is the current version of c brush you're using as well normally z plugin and fbx export import is the way you would go go about doing this but this doesn't bake in poly paint currently i don't know why so you can actually export from this menu over here as well choose fbx into our project directory save it out and then this little dialog is going to pop up now this is the same dialog as let's just export this now as with before now we can import it now we have to import it manually this time let's go to fbx and find our spikes now when you're importing an sfpx from zbrush usually there's a scale issue so i like to set this to a thousand this seems to be what's working well for me obviously the scale was off a little bit but that's fine now we have this and you can see it's tried to connect the diffuse texture as well didn't quite find it but you can use it for this as well we're just going to be focusing on poly paint so again search for attribute connect the color and right call and there you go now our poly paint data is connected to this in in a similar way another way you can go about this is with the multi-map exporter especially if you have a lot of sub tools if you go to z plugin hit multi-map exporter texture from poly paint and export mesh this is going to export your meshes with textures as well what you can do as well is under export options under displacement map this is where you define which subdivision level is going to be exported out normally it's set to one this is your first subdivision level but for some reason if you want it to be your highest you know just match whatever highest subdivision level you have on your objects and you'll be good to go i think that just about covers everything about this workflow for me the gobi workflow with packing and unpacking files is definitely the fastest way to go because it just allows me to do everything in one click and i can store everything in in a custom project directory really easily and it makes it really easy to share with other people as well you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 59,257

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d, GoB, Blender to zbrush, zbrush to blender, blender to zbrush workflow, zbrush to blender workflow, GoZ for Blender, Exporting from Zbrush

Id: 2-pFspCbykk

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020