How do you get your completed sculpts from Zbrush in to Blender for rendering?

How do I get a completed and textured sculpt from ZBrush into Blender? I’d like to use Cycles to tweak the materials and nodes to get more realistic looking renders. I used to be familiar with Blender and feel I could get better looking images with it than with ZBrush’s rendering abilities.

I’ve installed GoB and can successfully get my .obj of a sculpt back and forth between the two programs but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get the textures and maps from ZBrush in and applied to the model for a proper render in Blender. Can anyone help me out? I’m not finding many tutorials or useful information about this.

Have you seen this? : http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/06/03/using-gob-zbrush-applink-blender/

If i am not mistaken, the poly paint wont carry over. You would need to have the mesh UVed and then bake that information onto a texture map within Zbrush. In Blender you can then load that texture map. There’s also a trick where you can use xnormal to bake color information onto a low poly, but I dont know enough of that particular pipeline to know if its worth pursuing.

Yeah, I’ve watched this at least ten times. I have the GoB set up and can get between the two programs like he does in the video. But the texture map is not just “there” in Blender Internal or Cycles like he clicks. I can get the texture to show up in the Blender view window when set to texture view, but it doesn’t render. And I can find no trace of the texture when I switch over to Cycles.

I exported the texture externally from Zbrush itself and uploaded it but could not get the texture to line up properly even after unwrapping the UVs in Zbrush.

I think I’m forgetting something on the Blender end…it’s been a while since I’ve worked with it and it’s so not intuitive.

Zbrush flips the textures by default. You have to go to manually click the flip button in zbrush to orient it to how it appears in blender, or use an external 2d editting software and flip vertical. Or just flip the UVs in blender. Easier just to do it in zbrush upon export.

If you don’t want to faff around with the GoB addon:
In Zbrush bake the polypaint to a texture (UV unwrap if you haven’t done so)
Clone the texture to the texture panel, flip vertically and save the texture file
Export the tool from ZBrush as a obj file (this will be for the currently selected subdivision level) and import into blender
Add a material to the object, add the texture to the material mapped to the UV coordinates of your object

If you use the Multi Map exporter plugin in ZBrush it will export the obj and flipped texture map automatically as well as any other types of maps (normal, displacement, cavity, AO)

When I made that video (and just now when I checked again) textures, both color and normal, and poly paint were both exported back to Blender automatically set up for Blender Internal. Just took a couple of clicks to get things ready for Cycles.

Saint: with the addon that’s all handled automatically

Thats good to know. I have always just done it manually but I am glad to know that the addon is capable of interacting with zbrush in that way.