A free plugin by Janos Hunyadi for importing textures created with ZBrush’s Polypaint directly into Maya. The author is looking for someone who can help compile the plugin for 3DS Max. More on Vimeo.
ZBrush Polypaint importer
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The maya users should be happy with this, I hope you can find somebody to help you with the Max version. I have time but not sure I would have the expertise to be of any use to you on writing a Max version of this. I hope you can find a competent Max person who can help you port this to 3ds max.
this would indeed be an extremely handy thing to have.
applause to the author.
Is this more than a UV color channel or is it just written into a non-conform OBJ file?
It’s vertex colors, and it’s sort of conforming to the standard, but most software doesn’t support OBJs with color values. This Maya script reads it from the OBJ file and applies it to the vertex color system that exists in Maya.
Yes Polypaint data is in a non-conform OBJ.
This is pretty cool. So it transfers the polypaint to vertex colors… What’s the benefit in doing this? It’s never been easier to create a solid uv map and export bitmaps. I assume if you make changes in ZB, you can reload the vertex color assignments?
i would love to see this in max, if its possible to bake the polypaint data onto a low poly mesh along with the normals ect from the high poly mesh then im sold. dont have to worry about UV’s then for highpoly objects
Old post, and maybe you know by now, but thought I’d clarify just in case.
Polypaint is “vertex colors”, each vertex on your mesh is assigned a color value, and then these colors are blended across the faces. So the resolution of the polypaint is dependent on vertex density. Thus there’s no way you could possibly transfer your polypaint to a low-poly mesh without having UVs on the mesh, as there is nowhere near enough vertices to hold all the color information you want.
If you want a low-poly mesh, then just do a quick UVMaster on it, it does a great job at unwrapping things for you. Is it the absolute most optimal UV unwrap? No, but if all you want to do is quickly get your polypaint onto a low-poly for some quick use, then it’s fine.