Mesh fragmenting

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to UV a sword mesh that I've made and learn to texture it Substance Painter. I made the mesh in zbrush and imported into maya to get better at UVing it in there. When I imported it the different parts of the mesh fragmented. I combined those fragments back into their larger parts, but that didn't seem to do the trick. Because when I tried to unwrap it in the UV editor, it still shows up as fragments. Has anyone run into this problem and fixed it?

[damaggio]

Are you sure that the vertices are all merged in the sword blade?

This type of UV projection happens when pieces of the mesh are detached.

[damaggio]

Combine is not the same as merging.

[Anonymous]

When I work on it in zbrush, the mesh holds together and I don't see any indication of it breaking apart. It's only when I import into maya is when it happens. Is it something to do with how I export from zbrush? I just usually export as an obj.

[damaggio]

I don't use zbrush but if you want I can take a look at your mesh and Uvs.

Just zip your file here.

[Zeriel00]

Try selecting everything in the UV editor then Move & Sew then unwrap it again and it should be one object

Next time use a different unwrap method like UV>Planar if UV>Automatic didn't work

Also you may want to retopologize heavy meshes you get from Zbrush, that sword is way too high poly!

This would be my face if I was your supervisor and you gave me that sword to put in a game xD

[Anonymous]

Heres the .rar file. I didn't know how to include the UV's so I just seperated the fragments again. Thanks for offering to take a look.

[Anonymous]

Its roughly 3k polys. I thought it was pretty low. Whats a good number? I'm hoping to start upload models to sell to 3dexport and other sites to maybe make a little extra money on the side and polycounts seem to be all across the board there. Whats a good rule of thumb for posting on those sites.

[damaggio]

As I said in my previous post hechastetr, your mesh blade is completely detached, you have to merge all the blade parts back together.MERGE VERTICES NOT COMBINE COMMAND.

I don't know how you made this happen but it should be very easy to fix.

Also please clean up the left over nodes in your scene before uploading, you should learn to maintain your file in an organized way, that will help you

much more in future projects or for selling it on websites.

Best of luck.

[Zeriel00]

OK short answer is select everything > combine > delete history and do UVs    Never mind read below

Long answer, and you're not going to like hearing this, but the topology of this model is horrible and unusable. I think you're going the wrong way about modeling in general. You shouldn't use Zbrush to model such a simple object because Zbrush is made for high level detail (Picture Godzilla's face) and then the model is retopologized completely and the high detail of Zbrush is applied as a Normal map.

A sword for example is something straight forward, non organic, that can be made simply with box modeling, the face of the blade is a straight hard surface object that can be done with like 20 polygons and you got here over 2K and 90% of the lines running down the blade's face are useless because they add nothing to it's shape. Not to mention a lot of vertices are not even connected.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way since I'm learning how to model too. I hope you can learn from this and try making better use of topology. I think this model is better discarded and completely redone as a box model in Maya. Focus on learning how to box model and good topology first and don't worry about UVs or Zbrush for a while. When you get down the basics then go back to Zbrush, sculpt high level detail and apply it to your box models as normal maps. Remember Good topology is the foundation!

Hope this helps 🙂

Also here's an example of a sword is not about just how many polygons is how many you NEED

[damaggio]

I agree with zerie 100%...Looks like you need a better grasp of simple modeling and Uv technics  before jumping into Zbrush complexity.

[Anonymous]

Ok, good to know. Thanks for the help guys! Back to the drawing board.

[Anonymous]

When exporting from Zbrush unselect "group" under the Tool > Export options. Leave Merge selected. When group is selected it separates each face when uv mapping.