How to print in colors when mesh has been decimated

Hi everyone,

I wanted to know if anyone has got a colored print of any character recently. I created a character in Zbrush and since I was sculpting in 1 million tris, I have to get that decimated to bring down under 64 mb size.

Problem is I am not sure if I have polypainted anything, it will be intact on the decimated mesh. I dont want to work on the mesh/ topology again to texture that 3dsmax or photoshop, as it will be too time consuming.

Please help if anyone has got a good colored print, I would be certainly thankful.

You should contact shapeways directly at service@shapeways.com

The trick is to make a cube with the same volume as your mesh.
They will assist you further.
Cheers,

Rob

Thanks Rob,

I was looking from the user's point of view also, so that anything time saving or to say experienced way can be explored.
Looks like I ve contact the customer service only.

I looked through the tutorials in Shapeway, but it was way too basic to understand from the character's angle. It was showing a texture projected on a box only.

Regards,
Bhaskar

I assume you have textured you 1 million polygon model?
You can bake the texture into the vertexmap in Zbrush.
I don't how the vertexmap will go thru decimate, so you need to experiment with that.
I think you can save as color-stl, and upload that to shapeways.

If you have a separate texturemap, and want to use it instead of the vertexmap ( which has less then perfect results)
Then you need it to save it as vrml 2.0

You need to edit the vrml file and remove 'file:///' before your uvmap-name. For example: beast.jpg is referenced as
file:///beast.jpg
change it to:
beast.jpg


You will need to have the uvmap and your vrml-model in one zip-file.

Textured objects are a pain in the behind to work with and will take some trail and error to get right, good luck

Rob

Thanks Rob.

Yes polypaint is the method of painting on the vertices.
So I am not sure how it will effect when so many vertices will be removed after decimation.

I need to check around and play with my software.

Thanks for your help, I ll put up more queries if anything I may come across.