Dazed and Confused

[eddiewolf]

I have been going through the POSTS and have seen great examples of normal mapping and displacement mapping. But I am confused about if these abilities are currently in z-brush or if they are soon to be added features. The lizard with the eggs sample is from a year ago. Also the NORMAL material that is available has the maps generated with this been tested in moving animations. And last but not least is there a tutorial that properly shows you how to use this material.

[andreseloy]

Hi eddiewolf Welcome and congratulations to be here¡¡
Here is the link that show you was has the actual 1.55b ZB and what(some of the new among other) feature will have the next version (free to owner of the previous version)Quicklink for the 1.55b (http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000060)

[Jaycephus]

Eddie, the displacement mapping was originally planned for the current version, but was held out. The next version is in Beta, and it is due to be out Real Soon Now. Some of the posts with advanced modeling techniques have been made with the beta version, and the post should say so. Only a privileged few have the beta version, so most of us are still in the dark about what it will look like.

[eddiewolf]

I been doing a little research and in Maya at least, normal mapping is difficult to use in a render. If the normal map is based on WORLD SPACE then any deformation such as I.K. disrupts the normals. There is one plug-in that uses normal maps but you have to manually build these complex shader nodes just to use it. Also wether the object is nurbs sub-d's or poy's makes a huge difference. Don't get me wrong I love the new samples (enough that I'm saving to buy z-brush for myself) but if this can't be implemented in a moving character this might lead to alot of headaches. I'm partial to learning the maya aspect of this because that is what we use at work.