ZApplink for lowpoly

I recently finished another model for my portfolio and while trying out some things I came up with something that helped me a lot and some of you guys might not know yet. It's not groundbreaking but it helped me to speed along the texturing part smoothly.

As some of you may know Zbrush has a plugin that allows you to project textures directly on your model (as long as you have layed out the UVs beforehand) and that is done using ZAppLink, which connects Zbrush to your image editing program of choice. Mine is Photoshop.

I was trying to use it to texture a fairly lowpoly model of a head (250 tris) but it was giving me some awful results that looked like a shattered mirror instead of a projected picture. It can give you a faint hint at some things but overall it is not that useful. That is because of the model's polygon density. What can you do when you get to this point? Logically you can subdivide your model until it has enough density, but what about ZBrush's pet hate of triangles and vertices with more than one edge connected to it?

Turn this...

Apparently the problem only rises if you want to change your geometry afterwards. In some cases it wrecks your model and that's why if you want to use Zbrush to actually sculpt it's mandatory that it's all in quads. This means you can bend one of Zbrush's main rules: "No triangles, just quads!" to your advantage.

...into this!

So subdivide your model until you have enough density (35.000 tris was more than enough on this case). Some of your model's definition will be lost because smoothing causes it to be a lot more rounded.You don't even have to save your subdivided, unaltered model. After all, the model you're texturing is the one you already had in the first place.

Of course there's a lot of work to do in Photoshop after this is done but hopefully it helps those who find it hard to start texturing. I used about six main projections and a couple of small ones for the whole head.

Good texturing!

(The reference pictures come from 3d.sk)