I am trying to import my models into Mudbox for texturing but not getting satisfying results. I have been trying exporting obj and fbx formats, also importing them first to 3d max and sending them from there to
Mudbox.

If I create uvs in Mudbox I would need to open them in 3d max uv editor and separate them little from each other to get rid of extra artifacts during painting. Seems like there are always errors or faces not displaying correctly with quads. So far best results have been exporting triangles from Moi and after rearranging uvs, paint in Mudbox.

I am thinking if someone has figured out way to export directly to Mudbox and create automatic uvs in there. Sending quad mesh from 3d max to Mudbox is converted into triangles.
Maybe zbrush is not so picky when importing models.

Hi timo, I'm not really familiar with Mudbox myself but the automatic UVs that MoI generates itself are just not really suitable at all for painting, you'll probably need to have better UVs generated to get good painting results.

I don't know if it helps you or not but you can turn off MoI's automatic UV generation in the moi.ini file, go to Options > General and push the Edit .ini file button, then inside there go down to the [OBJ Export] section, and find the entry for WriteTextureCoordinates=y and edit it to say =n like this:

[OBJ Export]
<....>
WriteTextureCoordinates=n


If Mudbox does not generate good UVs for itself to use, maybe one of these standalone uvmapping programs will do a better job:

UVMapper: http://www.uvmapper.com/
Unwrap3D: http://www.unwrap3d.com/u3d/index.aspx
Unfold3D: http://www.polygonal-design.fr/

- Michael

Hi Timo - I tried some dabbling with moi/mudbox about a year or so ago. I found the best results were obtained by setting angle to 40 and to export as triangles only. You then set the smoothing levels you need in mudbox. Then you can texture and paint using the mudbox toolset. Mudbox is way too sensitive on obj/fbx imports. 3DCoat is better for importing, but i can't get on with that as much as MudBox. I did not turn off UV co-ords though, so it might be worth a try, but i doubt it will help as MudBox never gave an error regarding UV's, it moaned about things like ...

too many polygons sharing a point/vertex
no support for importing quads or n-gons
and that smoothing applied was not of a recognised type such as Catmull-Clark

If those are the types of errors you are getting, then drop the density of the mesh generated by Moi to the bare minimum needed to keep coarse details.

Hope that helps you out a little

Martin Spencer-Ford

Thanks for your advice. Its not really an issue with uvs from Moi, I would like to unwrap the model inside Mudbox with the automatic mapping. I just could not get the mesh imported correctly without errors or bad shading.

I will try different meshing options like you suggested.