Painting bump maps

[oelk]

Hi dear Zbrush fellas.

I try to figure out how to paint classic bumpmaps and of course how to display them
in my viewport.

I love working with displacment in projection master but there is a point I have massive performance problems (subd_5 is fine, with subd_6 or more my comp gets down) I think for micro_detailing bumps will do the job for me..but how to?

Thanks for your advices in advance.

Oelk

[wchamlet]

Make sure you have a texture assigned to your model, starting with a mid grey color.

Then import the bumpviewer material from your materials folder, and start painting in Projection Master. You will get a real time preview of your bumps.

[oelk]

That works perfect!

Well mostly perfect.
After I drop projection master the bump looks quadratized at the edges "edit" (well the damn quick preview button :) )

One more question.

After i painted the bumbmap in projektion master using the bump material....is there a way to paint a colourmap with displaying the bump at the same time?

Thank you for your fast and helpfull responds.

Oelk

[wchamlet]

That would get a bit tricky in Zbrush.

You could do it one of two ways.

Most materials in Zbrush have a color-bump slider that will add bumps to your model. I believe that negative, or low scales make indention's and the high scales make bumps. You can just paint your textures with this setting on a level that you like, but you will miss the accuracy that using the bump material will get you.

Another way to do this is to use a combination of two textures to make the color bump work better.

Make the bump map "Grey scale map" first.

Then texture your model without any bumps.

Then you can try and combine the two maps together in a 2D editor. Make your color texture the base layer, and copy and paste the grey bump map as another layer. Use either a darken, multiply, overlay, or screen setting in Photoshop to blend the bump layer with the color layer. Save this file out and go back to Zbrush.

Now in Zbrush, in the material setting, you can adjust your color-bump slider to mimic how your bumps looked with the bump-viewer material.

Or you could just use the bump material to use as a displacement map on your model.

[Diamant]

is there a way to have zbrush use the bump map when creating the normal map so all that information gets combined into one normal map?

[wchamlet]

Why not just convert the bump map to geometry then make the normal map? You can get up to 4 million polygons with the right hardware, so that should give you plenty of room to make the bumps into actual geometry.

[Diamant]

thats an option.. how do you do that by the way?

[wchamlet]

Grub posted a great tutorial that illustrates that technique.
http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=014916

That should help you out tremendously!

[oelk]

wchamlet is to fast for me ..thanks!
----------------------------

to convert the bumpmap to geometry before
generating the normalmap is exactly the workflow i am looking after at all.

why bother with a to high polycount during my workflow if i can use bumbs with a much better viewport performance and sharp details instead of displace the mesh at a high polycount and having crispy details in my viewport,
because the comp cant handle subd 6 and above on complex meshes in real time with a good framerate.

i tryd to figure it out by myself after wchamlet had explained me how to use the bumbs but to be honest i have no clue how to atm :)

[Diamant]

that is a cool way of doing it..however.. in the end i need that detail in the normal map.. and if you turn it into a displacement map.. it wont go into the normal map.. any ideas? this is for a game by the way.. thats why i can't use a displacement map too..

[wchamlet]

I'm sure you can convert the displacement map into geometry and apply the "hi-res" geometry to a normal map right? I don't know if it's possible to do this in Z2 this way, but you could use ORB to do it.

[Diamant]

yea i dont know how to convert this to geometry in z2.. what is ORB?

[Zeddicus]

Just posted a link to this thread over a CGTalk. Yes, you can apply a greyscale map as either a render effect in Zbrush (there is a Zscript in there somewhere on how to do it) as well as apply the map as actual physical geometry distortions on a high rez mesh. I've done it before with the test head Pixolator posted in order to create a normal map to play with. Just follow the instructions for doing the render effect type, but make sure you don't have a texture applied to the model when you hit the apply displacement button.