Sculpt Room to Paint Room - No UVs.

[3Dell]

Hi everyone,

I am new to 3D COAT and have watched lots of videos regarding the issue I am having currently, but none seem to touch on this specific problem.

I have several scanned OBJs (UV'd and textured) which I need to bring into 3D Coat to align together. Once they are all aligned I then need to export them out of 3D Coat and into Maya. When I inport each scan into the Sculpt room as a Surface, the geo loses its UVs, but creates vertex paint colours and that's fine because it means I have enough texture information to align my scanned pcs together. 
The problem is that when I export them out again as OBJs or FBX they do not export out with paint vertex colors or any texture. Is there to a way to import geometry into the sculpt room and retain UVs?

I need to have textures on this geometry before I export it out of 3D Coat. How can I do this?

[Czepta]

Not sure if I understand what you are trying to do fully. Are the objs high poly or low poly? I think if you want to get uvs and textures off a high poly object from the sculpt room you would have to retopo the obj and bake them out. If you already have the obj you could import them as a retopo mesh so you don't have to redo it by hand. Then if you have separate pieces you can just stitch the retopo meshes together.

[3Dell]

Hi Czepta,

Thanks for your reply. Really appreciate it.

First of all I am scanning something in a warehouse which has been manufactured based off a digital design. The idea is that the manufactured object should be to scale with the original design.

I am bringing in very high poly scans into the Sculpt room to begin with. Immediately my UVs get wiped out, which I understand and I am okay with. So now, my textures get converted to vertex paint colours and that is great because this gives me the visual information needed to line up several scans of one object together. The object I am scanning is large and must be scanned in several passes to make up the entire object. Those passes then need to be aligned in 3D Coat to build the full entire object. I find that 3D Coat does a great job of aligning and the scale to fit option is really handy. So for now I want to try everything possible using 3D Coat.

I need to then export this newly aligned geometry out of 3D Coat and back to Maya with the same textures I had on it before coming into 3D COAT. 

What would you suggest I do in terms of workflow? I need to figure out how I can bake my original textures back onto the geometry. I assume baking the vetex colours is the solution, but the vertex colours are not quite as good as the original texture from a quality point of view. The scanned OBJs I am importing into 3D COAT are very high poly and retain the texures well, but there is 30 to 40 percent reduction in quality from my original textures. 

How is this done so I can export out of 3D Coat with textures? Do I have to retopolize before baking textures and how would I import my original textures back onto my sculpt geometry?

If I need it to retopolige my sculpt geometry it has to be at a very high poly count for reasons of accuracy as I am checking for any deviation from scanned data back to the original concept digital model. Having quality textures in the same place is big deal .

 

Thanks again for your help, It's greatly appreciated!