Keyshot for zBrush. Problem mix. Materials, position, camera lock and meshes.

[Hellborn]

I have been working on my first zBrush / Keyshot project and I have run into some very annoying problems.

The workflow I have used is to send the project over to keyshot in parts.
Reason for that is mainly to keep transfer time and memory usage down.
And there is really no point in waiting for not updated geometry to transfer again.

So in this scene of a female dipping her toes in a pond, with a field of grass and trees in the background i started with getting some xFrog trees into zBrush.
Here I run into problems with textures importing upside down into zBrush.
It was not possible to flipV in zBrush, that did something wierd to the UVs witch made it impossible (at least to me) to flipV in Keyshot instead.
Workaround was instead to leave it upside down in zBrush and then  switch to UVmapping and flip it in Keyshot.
After getting this to work i made a groups for the trees moved them there (as not sent over objects in the zBrush groups gets deleted) and  saved the trees as bip.

Next to get over was the female, some reed and turfs of weeds butterflies etc.
Assigned materials in Keyshot and set skin material but kept the vertex coloring in that case.
This was transfer i did several times while making updates on them and while doing so I lost materials assigned in Keyshot on several occasions and had to assign the materials again. In the end I saved all materals so I at least could get them back with least effort.
When done I moved female, weeds, reeds etc to new groups outside the zBrush folder and saved as bip.

I then started to get the last items over. The field, grass, water for the pond.
Loaded some tree bip files and starting to make duplicates of them and the weed to fill the scene up.
Tried to move some weeds in position using MoveTool but stuff just jumped around.
I could put it some place and when selecting next weed to move the first jumped away and placed itself in another place.
So I started to move items by changing values instead witch worked better but was not foolproof.

Now the scene starts to look decent.
Have to do a little adjustment to the ground so I fix it in zbrush and send the object over again.
Before doing so I have locked the Camera position as I did see a video that showed that one could lock it to keep a nice composition.
The ground is the only object that remains in the zbrush folder.

After loading I see nothing in the Camera and have to unlock and reposition it again.
I make several tries but on every transfer it moves, or the objects in the scene moves.
I dont know witch.

Also at one point the weeds meshes inside a totally different group than the zBrush group was replaced with the reed mesh?
I have to delete them and send the weeds over again.

In the end I did manage to get it together.
Still have to add some more trees, and maybe some flowers and find a god background.
But it sure was a bumpy ride.

I hope all this stuff gets sorted out.
Because once it's in there I really like the speed of Keyshot.
I guess I'm at about 150Miljon triangles now and it's still wery responsive.

Splitting up the transfers as I did helps a lot in getting stuff over both when it comes to time and memory demands.
But how should I do that in a safe way so I can be sure that geometry outside the zBrush folder won't be affekted.
I tried to rename the meshes but found no rename option. Is it possible to rename them?
Renaming in zBrush might be a possible workaround.
I have not tried if that helps.
I really don't know as I have no knowledge on how Keyshot decides on what to update in a transfer from zBrush and what to leave alone.

Maybe someone at Keyshot can spread some information on how I best work if I want to work this way.


EDIT:
Another strange thing I run into and that I would like to get fixed is the following.
Say I get a model over from zBrush into Keyshot.
When I'm happy with how it looks in Keyshot I'll move it to a new group outside the zBrush folder.
If I then transfer something new from zBrush new mesh will end up in Keyshot as invisible.
I can select the mesh in the list and the countour higlights, but nothing renders.
The workaround has been to start over by deleting the zBrush map , save everything else as bip and close Keyshot.
Then transfer from zBrush again and when done import the bip file.
It's probably enough to save and reload the project but I have not verified that yet.