Please help, Fibermesh from Zbrush and Daz

Dark45

Hey guys,

Thank you so much for taking time to read my question and I hope you may have some insight for me. It's kind of a long post but I want to be sure to provide you with as much detail as I can.

Back about a month ago I got into Zbrush and it has really changed my life with Daz studio, such an amazing tool.

As some of you may know already I make animal characters, so having a good workflow for fur and hair is of upmost importance.

I have gathered a good understanding with Strand Based Hair and Look At My Hair however I've always wanted a better way of styling. Two days ago I decided to give Fibermesh a try in Zbrush and... well it's very close to exactly what I've been needing in my life.

I have hit a wall though that I have not been able to get over for the last day or so. I have screenshots to hopefully help with this discussion.

Inside of Zbrush I have been able to figure out how to take a texture, convert it to polypaint, apply the polypaint to the base mesh, and then pull that color data from the mesh so that is shows on the fibermesh that I created.

Here is a screenshot of a tail I have been working with in Daz. This image is a Strand Based Hair example.

As you can see the result looks ok but I've always wanted a little more out of the fur I have been making. Better styling options and workflow would be a huge help.

Here is a screenshot of the texture underneith the fur. Strand Based Hair is using this same texture to map the colors to the fur.

 

This leads us to Zbrush. I have noticed that you can bake a texture onto a mesh with polypaint and send it to daz via GoZ with it's color data. Here is an example of a new .obj tail sent from zbrush as a new object / mesh to daz. The shader is wrong so it's all polished and shiny but there is no issue yet with this.

 

Now to the issue I am having. In Zbrush, I have created a fibermesh that I wish to send back to Daz with color data or at least find a way to import the color data seperately if I can. This is the Zbrush example with the color being pulled from the polypainted tail underneith. Even though this is an unstyled quick example, this looks very promising to me, the coloring is off compared to what I want but that can be resolved later.

 

I would really like to get this polypaint into Daz that is on this fibermesh but when I send the fibermesh to Daz using GoZ, no color data is baked or brought with the new mesh. Example below.

Another method I have tried but have failed miserably at is creating a new Texture Map from the polypaint of the fibermesh. This method freezes zbrush and I get the spinning mouse cursor of doom. I've read up on this and they say to lower the subd to it's lowest when creating the FiberUV. Then bring the subd back up before clicking the Create Texture from Polypaint option. However doing this still results in a freeze for Zbrush.

I hope we can figure this out and thank you for your time.

Kind regards,
- Donte