Well.....I was able to export it as an obj just fine. Thanks for that mookie.....and the sculpt that appears in my viewport in Mudbox is fine and looks good. But trying to apply a baked displacement back in max results in what almost looks like a flat square of a section of the belly (kind of like the stencil is flattening it out). I’m almost certain that’s not what’s occuring.....but I’m getting tired of trying to get this right to be quite honest.

Not to judge unfairly or anything (I know there are learning curves for all 3d apps), but for being such an intuitive sculpting tool it’s been that user un-friendly and then some for creating displacements. I really think the documentation needs to get a little better so it isn’t so much of a trial and error and hunt and peck sort of ordeal… : P

I hear you. And then when you compound that with Mental Ray’s quirkynes and buginess.... you want to pull your hair out.

I think these guys made mudbox with renderman in mind. I wish I had a grand to plunk down for renderman, but I just did a whole big upgrade to 64, paid my taxes, and for my daughters preschool tuition and now I’m tapped. So I gotta suffer through Mental ray’s finickyness for a while.

The truth is that I personally had a much harder time with zbrush 2. With zbr2 I gave up on displacements completely and just used the highest level. When I did get dismaps made from zbr2, I was never happy with the accuracy. So for me, I’m happy with Mudbox. Took me a month to figure out how to get a good map in mudbox, but now I get what I want, so I’m very happy. i really wish there was a manual though so that I could completely understand all the advanced options.

I still believe that the majority of mudbox problems result from something in the mesh or the uv’s. Or the way that each persons 3d app handles .obj. (which is a mesh problem too). I’ve been trying to get a friend of mine to try mudbox (he’s a purist, no dismaps or digital sculpting) he finally brought over one of his models the he created in Lightwave. After hE did some sculpting, we ended up having a hard time getting a good dismap, until I re-exported it from Maya. I don’t know why and I never could figure out why.

I find that I get the best results when I convert the polys to sub-d surfaces before rendertime. I don’t know if Max has sub-d surfaces, but you may want to try that.

By the way, you are baking 32 bit maps right? and are you setting the subdivision in the baker to good for both the high-res and the low-res? Have you tried contacting Dave or Tibur? They are really good about taking a look at your mesh and uv’s.

Yeah what turned me off to zb2 was the poorly designed translation tools (I remember using the zoom feature and wondering why it was making my meshes all fuzzy in the viewport), then the dropping of the tools to the canvas when switching modes.......that just killed me.

I was wondering, when I bring my displacement back into mental ray should I have to subdivide my max poly mesh before dropping the displacement on it? I get the best results when subdividing the base mesh twice.......which makes it very dense. I thought I ought to be able to drop the disp map on the base untouched and not have look all faceted.

So check it. I’ve spent the last 4 hours trying to figure this out and once again it’s completely beyond me. Mostly I’ve been trying to move up and down levels and hide and unhide the mesh. All the while I’m moving the levels data from the HD to the RAM and back. No success whatsoever. Tibor or Dave have you ever seen anything like this? In my screen you can clearly see that two levels of the mesh are in RAM at one time. I’ve moved the levels data to the HD in the screenshot so level 1 should not be in memory.....at least I don’t think it should. I need to run a few more tests to see if my issues are on the max side of things, but I suspect it ties into this stubborn level.

Note that during previous sculpts I had periodically been flattening the mesh’s subdivisions. Any ideas? I’m stumped.

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/6800/3layershf7.jpg

wow, that’s bizarre. have you tried to see if this happens on another mesh?

I take that back slightly for the screenshot. The data is in ram in this picture. If I had moved the levels to the HD both level 2 and 4 would have a 0 under the “In RAM” column. Color me crazy!  : P

I take that back slightly for the screenshot. The data is in ram in this picture. If I had moved the levels to the HD both level 2 and 4 would have a 0 under the “In RAM” column. Color me crazy!  : P

lol, i didn’t notice that either :)

So I think I’ve figured this out. I tried to resculpt the orc a second time and half way into it found that the issues before are appearing again. I did a bit more digging on the forums and found another post by catfeesh that deals with a similar issue. In his (or her) case, the offending mesh would be the level 0 mesh that would appear when using the “Move Levels Data” option then hiding and unhiding the mesh. In my case it was level 1. I believe this is because my level 0 mesh has triangles in it and Mudbox doesn’t like it. As a result, it’s treating my level 1 mesh like the level 0 from their issue and keeping it in the scene.

To wit......it would be a really nice feature to have the ability to delete the current level 0 mesh and have the next level above it take it’s place as level 0. I’m not sure if it’s even possible, but trying to export particular levels and then reimporting them with earlier versions of a sculpt seems like a hard way to work around the issue.....I still haven’t been able to get the import as layer feature to work correctly.

Could you please contact on this issue as well. We may be able to better help you there on this specific case.

that’s on my wish list. the ability to deltel the lower levels.