Posted a new tutotial on my website, discussing how to convert your mudbox model to both MentalRay for max and just using max’s regular Displace Modifier. Available here:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/mudbox_max/mudbox_max.htm

Let me know if you see anything weird. And thanks to a lot of people here for information that contributed to this tutorial. Lastly, I’ll be adding more parts to this, like how to render using Brazil 2’s displacement, in the future.

- Neil

Nice tutorial, Neil.. this will help a lot of people.

Great tutorial and very welcome!

Thank you.

If I could make one suggestion would be that in most situations you would not need to have smooth UVs set to ON. This could create a misalignment between the extracted result and the UVs originally created in Max since you are asking Mudbox to smooth the UVs before baking the normal or displacement map.

So in most cases Smooth UV can be ‘OFF’.

Its great to see the community helping each other like this.

Thanks again.

So in most cases Smooth UV can be ‘OFF’.

Thanks Dave. I’ll make the change to my tutorial, however, could you explain a situation where you’d want Smooth UV’s to be turned on so I can include it in the tutorial? Thanks.

- Neil

This could create a misalignment between the extracted result and the UVs originally created in Max since you are asking Mudbox to smooth the UVs before baking the normal or displacement map.

Actually, thinking about it, isn’t this exactly what we want?

So basically, mudbox is subdividing the mesh, and if you turn this feature on, it smooths the uvs, then extracts a displacement map.

In max, you basically subdivide the mesh, and that process smooths the uvs automatically, and then it applies the displacement value from the map.

So if you wanted the two of them to be aligned, wouldn’t you have to turn smooth uvs in mudbox on?

- Neil

You da man as always.

-hungereater:D :D :D

I’ve purchased two sets of dvd’s for working with mudbox but neither of them addressed how to take a basic mesh from max, get it into mudbox to do the detailing, then get it back to max and have it display the detail from mudbox session. Could someone perhaps do a walkthru or tutorial please.

1.Export your poly object from Max as an obj.file and make sure it is all quads. As square as possible, no elongated edges.

2.Open Mud and import your 3d max creation. It will import at the same rez as you exported.

3. Subdivide your mesh in Mud up to 2 million faces which is good for details, such as adding fine textures (wrinkles etc.)

4.Lower your mesh back down to first level and move level data from Ram to your hardrive. This will help free up ram on your comp.

5.  Start around subd level 3 and start to sculpt. experiment with each brush to see the effects on the mesh. If your mesh was centered in Max on the x,y axis then you can use the mirror function of the brushes across the x axis enabling you to sculpt both sides at once.
Also if you are working on a character import the t-pose first and then import the posed version as a layer and you can use the mirror “tangent” feature.
This allows you to sculpt on both sides even when your model is in a pose. ( Do not change the vert order of your posed mesh or this won’t work)

6.Once you are happy with the sculpt, highlight the mesh in Mud (it will turn yellow) and export whatever level of the sculpt you want back into Max for rendering. I usually export a higher level for more details. Not 2 million of course…
you can also at this stage make a displac or normal map in Mud and export these to add the details of your high rez mesh to the render in Max.

7. Brush up on the Mud Docs and watch the video tuts provided. They will answer a great deal of your questions.
Hope that was enough to get you started....

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Thank you for taking the time to explain some of this procedure. I do appreciate it. I will try again and if I run into more problems I hope you dont mind me posting again.

glad to help, let me know

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This tutorial may help as well…

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/mudbox_max/mudbox_max.htm

- Neil