Mudbox help!!!!

[mayaPain]

Hi All

I've been having serious problems with a mudbox project I'm currently working on. I have spent 3 days trying to find a solution and I have achieved nothing

Well the problem is that I have combined several surfaces to one surface in maya. Then imported the exported obj from maya into mudbox. Went away and did my necessary sculpting. And then extracted the 32bit openEXR 4k map. Then exported the level 0 from mudbox and re-imported it back into Maya. Applied a shader to it, added the displacment map, added the subdiv approximation. Switched to mental ray and rendered away. Then I saw mayor problems!!!!!

Since I had several objects combined to one another the displacement came out very unexpected and as well as since several surfaces are intersecting one another, thus causing weird bursting of geometry.

I have tried exporting the combined low res and high res from mudbox into maya, and then seperating the geometry so each surface segment acts as an independent object. Then exported out each surface segment independently for both low res and high res from maya.

Then went back into mudbox and imported one of the low res surfaces. And then tried the method of importing as layer. So I subdivided the low res surface to match the corresponding hi res surface poly count and then went and tried to match vertes id, which caused it to get all mangly. So I tried the UV position option, and then got the error that source must have UVs and they don't exist.

It occurs for the body, legs, and tail. This will be animated so each piece needs to act independently. I have done a VERY BIG MISTAKE by COMBINING surfaces and then sculpting. I thought it will be easy to sculpt, well now I know it is not the way!!!!!!!! Causes serious problems went animating and when you have intersecting surfaces combined to one mesh.

here are the images

Holes Guide: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/2ad3ce0062.jpg
Intersecting Segments: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/a4b774835d.jpg
Level 0 : http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/47ef96cb55.jpg
Level 5: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/b27ee7e514.jpg


plz help!!!!!!!!!

[mayaPain]

Bad Render 01: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/d610f1ac57.jpg
Bad Render 02: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/a315d79c07.jpg
Bad Render 03: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/812d9bedd2.jpg
Bad Render 04: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/b0a28487c4.jpg

[mayaPain]

Combined Render out of Maya: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/6b3ae9600f.jpg

[RobinB]

Have you tried extracting the displacement using the Nearest Surface option? That way it should hit the first face of each tail part and ignore the overlapping parts. I think what you're seeing is the displacement map picking the wrong surface when it's generated.

Failing that, you should be able to extract the tail parts in Maya to seperate objects. That should maintain their UVs. Then you should be able to load them into Mudbox and displace them using the extracted map to approximate the result of the combined sculpted model. You'll probably have to clean up the overlapping bits by masking them off and sculpting them up again to fix the weirdness though.

Or you could export the high res mesh too, seperate out each part of that in maya and reimport them all to Mud and generate a set of new displacement maps from the new seperate high and low meshes and use those to displace the low res meshes.

p.s. Those screengrabs are kind of big, they're making posts hard to read.

[mayaPain]

Thanks for the tips RobinB, however I have tried all of that, and get very weird results.