Problematic UVs (or something else?), help needed

[RoopeB]

I created the base mesh in Maya, imported it to Mudbox and started sculpting. After some sculting I needed some painting and so I created the UVs (also tested it with PTEX). Here's what I came up with. I have no idea what I've done wrong here. The same problem occurs both with UVs and PTEX. 

I attach some pictures and one video. On video you can see the problems when trying to paint something. Somehow the paint "bleeds out" on other parts or is gets stuck or becomes very corner-edge-like.

Then I edited the base mesh back in Maya, re-imported it to Mudbox and tried to transfer the details to this new base. All I got was some very weid results. Is there any other way(s) to take my scultped areas and transfer / place them on new mesh with different topology?

UVs looks like this:

Video of the painting problem:

http://youtu.be/bAwbYfY3oBg

[paulkind]

Very strange.  Do you have your uv's all squared away?  That really looks (in the video) like your UVs are overlaping.  Overlaping UVs is about the only way ive seen mudbox act that way.  But it acts like that every time there are overlaping uvs.  The thing of it though is that you said you tried ptex...  ptext shouldnt do this. 

If I were you, I would however jump back to my imported mesh and check out the UV's in mayaLT or whatever you use.  I would double check and make sure all is ok with my uv's.  Maybe ptex is taking cues from your uv maps?  Not sure what else it could be.

[RoopeB]

I had no existing or previous UVs from Maya. That's why this is really strange behaviour.

See the picture on my first post of the UVs created in Mudbox. I think there are no overlaps?

Here is the base mesh I use:

[paulkind]

Well, i would agreed, it does not look that way... but... that is definately the behaviour exhibited when UVs are the issue.  What I would do is this...

1. Leave mudbox alone for now.

2. Open the originally imported fbx file in mayaLT/Maya/Max whatevs.

3. Unwrap (automatic is fine for testing, but if yuou havent used the Unfold 3D tool yet, now is the time...  that model will unwrap like a dream with it)

4. Save the unwrapped file as FBX

5. Go to Mudbox and level down to the base mesh (i dont think you need to delete your higher levels, for now just level down)

6. Select your model from the object list.

7. Go File > Import UV's in mudbox and select the new FBX file with corrected UV's

Test, all should be good now.

[RoopeB]

Thanks, I'll test it 🙂

[paulkind]

Goodd luck.  Ill watch this thread for any other trouble you may have.

One thing, if you are going to use the method above to fix, your base mesh you import for updating the uv's must be identical poly count to the one you originally imported to work.  You can move the UV's all you want, but dont add or remove polys.

[RoopeB · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately it did not work 😞 I'm still getting the same results even with the proper imported UVs. But something very unexpected just happened and I think it just might have solved my problem. Here's what I did:

I exported the original base mesh from Mudbox as .fbx and imported it to Maya for UV-creation. After creating the UVs I saved it back to .fbx and moved back to Mudbox. I then imported the UVs but it did not work but gave the same results as before. After this I imported the new base mesh with proper UVs and tried to transfer details on it just getting bad results as before. Then I hid everything else leaving only the new base mesh and used retopologize. And all the sudden everything (sculpted details) from the "bad" base mesh are transfered to this new retopologized. Results are quite good only some very minor weirdness visible on the model, 1 px sized "glittering" all over the model. If I use smooth on them they disappear. Although there are so much of them, I'm not sure will I be able fully get rid of them or do I need to.

Here's the glittering: