[Solved] Imported Meshes and Faceting

[Gary Dave]

I know there are threads on this already (one I think even made by me). But in the past when I imported a model into the sculpt room, it was usually okay for me to smooth out the faces (as it doesn't recognise normals/smoothing groups), as either the mesh wasn't finished anyway, or it was simple enough to do so.

But, in a few days I will be receiving a super dense character mesh from Zbrush (in either FBX or OBJ) that I need to retopo, UV and bake. My worry is it will drop into 3d coat all faceted again, but since this is a finished premade sculpt, I do not have the luxury (or the patience) to fix up a few million issues.

Does anyone know of how I might go about this? Maybe dropping the high res mesh straight into the retopo as a "huge mesh", or will 3d coat still facet the whole thing?

[Carlosan]

Surely will drop into 3DCoat all faceted. Try import the high res mesh into the retopo as a "huge mesh"

Hope it help

[Gary Dave]

Just to update this, unfortunately the "import as huge mesh" tries to merge separate objects, and has no option to swap Axis' around. I have a body, eyes, teeth, tongue, etc. And because it tries to merge everything, it fails the boolean operation (because it's importing to surface mode), but even if it didn't fail, it looks like I would be left with a model on its side anyway.

So, I'm a bit stumped. I can't even see if it will facet my mesh or not, but at this point it doesn't matter because I have no use for all the objects being merged into one. I'll need to import the sculpt I've been given into snother program, do the rotation here as well and then export all the pieces separately, and then probably retopo them one by one. Not ideal.

I will update later if huge mesh actually facets the model or not. If it does I really don't know what to do.

[Gary Dave]

So, importing as a huge mesh doesn't facet the mesh, which is good.

Unfortunately what it did do was absolutely obliterate my characters hands and feet. I am not sure why. 

So lastly, I tried to just import my mesh into the sculpt room without voxelisation.

And the good news is: Not faceted, imports multiple objects separately, and can be rotated if it comes in wrong.

So, it looks like maybe someone needs to look at the "huge mesh" retopo option, and either fix it or remove it.

[Carlosan]

Several users request the same, to remove it.

I hope dev team take it onto consideration

Thx for sharing.

[Gary Dave]

Another update:

So I mentioned before that importing without voxelisation comes in just fine, no faceting. But... if you then res+, resample or convert to voxels. You get the faceting back. 

Does anyone know if the devs are looking into importing sculpt meshes without faceting? For organic assets it's relatively okay, as you can smooth things out manually afterwards, but for hard surface imports that you need to sculpt over, I am struggling.

At the moment I have a lot of hard surface objects that I need to import and sculpt on, but it is proving to be an impossible task for 3dc.

[Gary Dave]

And as aslways... the moment you post, you find the solution again.

This is more of a workaround, so a bit of a hassle.

Step 1 (optional) - Import your mesh into the sculpt room like normal. Do any scaling you need to do here (to be voxel friendly) and to allow 3d coat to remember the original scale of the imported object. Can be with or without voxelisation, it's only used to remember scale, so doesn't matter.

Step 2 - Import the same mesh into the retopo room (it will have the same scale as the sculpt, even if you changed it when importing to sculpt room)

Step 3 - Delete the originally imported sculpt (if you imported one to the sculpt room), and in a new layer go to Geometry > Retopo Mesh -> Sculpt Mesh.

Step 4 - It will bring mesh into sculpt room as surface mode, you can res+ now without any faceting

Note: Some of your hard edges may smooth out a little. This is a bit annoying, and if you try to subdivide in the retopo room before bringing it into the sculpt room, you will get faceting again. So... not ideal, but this is the best results I've gotten so far for hard surface.

Edit

Step 5 (optional) - If your mesh isn't too complicated, you can loop select your hard edges and perform a bevel, this will help slightly when it comes to the res+ after you bring it in to the sculpt room.

Step 6 - Even if you're planning to work entirely in surface mode. Make sure you convert to voxels and then back again. Otherwise the brush alphas behave very strangely when sculpting, it looks super low res and spaced out, even though res of the mesh might be more than fine.

Edited September 16, 2019 by Gary Dave