A very quick & high quality alternative to Displacement & Normal Maps (by Rastaman)

[Rastaman]

That's right, Capu.


As I use it as a bump-map it is clear that you need a base-mesh with enough basic details, otherwise the bump-calculation of most apps cannot produce good enough results. And also, bump-mapping does not make a real deformation of the mesh like the displacement-feature.
But I think it's a very fast alternative to displacement, for stills as well as it should work with animations (there is no reason why it shouldn't work also with animations), and it is by far faster than displacement and gives very good results. And these results are also by far better than anything I could produce with usual normalmapping.

[capu]

well, I think the result is really nice on a high res mesh.

My only concern is if you really can use it for animation... well, why ?

have you ever tried to rig and skin a 400.000 poly character ?

well, not really completly sure abotu that, but I can imagine it could be a pain...

but don't get me wrong, I agree and think the result is great, but I guess its just for stills and it will be hard to use it for animation....

[Jester]

Actually I have always produced this type of map out of Zbrush...

As Jin told, it is basically the total differences of your base mesh, and your highest mesh. If you store your imported mesh as a morphtarget BEFORE doing any sculpt, or press the CAGE button on the lowest level before map calculation you recieve that type of map (and of course if there is enough differences between the lowest and highest levels). You should also take care the map settings, for example I'm pretty sure that if the ranges are set different values, you could get more out of the maps. Alas, these are not well documented, or at least I am not aware of any detailed documentation.

[FryerTuck]

Hi all. I was reading this thread with great interest and thought I would give the technique a go. It Worked fine but..: because of the process of adiing and deleting the morph targets the original safety morph I create before subdividing when I first bring in my mesh is cancelled out and the base model is smoothed or slightly resized when I export the mesh (I use mostly Zbrush UV's to save time). So... to counteract this, I create a deformation map for deforming the base mesh and use this to counteract the change in size - or to put it more simply, use the deformation map in place of the morph target. Alhough this works OK.., I was wondering if there was a less elongated approach or something I am missing in zBrush that could sort this.

What youse think?

Thanks all.

[Asgard666]

nice,

I´ll try this but do you use this map as a Disp.map ?

[Rastaman]

No, it's useless as a Dispmap.

The goal is, that you can use it as an excellent bump-map, by far better than any bump-map ZBrush normally creates and better than any Normal-map that you can create by any way.

[Asgard666]

ah you mean... a supermap? ;D

[Morph Division]

to "bring out" the details of your map (disp or bump, but usually disp) you need to tweak their curves in photoshop.

The "special" that you are seeing is a normal disp map but the tonal range in the black is actually closer to black and the same goes for the white.

Unless you need to use 32bit disp maps, 16bit is effective and production friendly. If you tweak the tonal range then you will get all your details in your render. (I use RM and MR in Maya and the results are great).

ZB spits out disp maps with a very compressed tonal range, however all the details are there.

IMO the actual need for 32bit disp goes beyond most production environments and personal projects, with regard to quality and expense/time.
If you can't make a 16bit map look good then you got no chance with 32bit.

The difference in tonal variations between 16bit and 32bit are as follows

8bit= 256 (0 to 255)
16bit= 65,536 (0 to 65,535)
32bit= 4,294,967,296 (0 to 4,294,967,295)

Tip (maya): Split your maps into two, course/big details and fine/small details then combine them through your shading network to a "disp node" via a "plus minus average" node. Set the operation to "sum"
And of course tweak the maps curves in PS.
To acheive two maps in ZB use layers and morph targets.

BTW use tga or tiff, forget map files your renderer will convert them automatically at render time.
The difference in time is next to nothing, especially since you've taken the time to tune your maps prior to rendering,
therefore not needing to boost your approximation settings desperately trying to see the details.

cheers

[florencepapillon]

I'm very interested in this tecnique. I have Zbrush 3.12 but the problem is that in order to create a displacement map, I must select a UV type (well, usually AUV tiles), and the result is just a block of displaced tiles ...

So I suppose this method works fine only if you have previously built a UV map in another 3D application ?

[J-L_A]

Thank you very much!

[Rastaman]

florencepapillon:

Yes,the UV-map was created with RoadKill.
But it should also work with AUV-Tiles from ZBrush.

[Mezmerrizer]

Many Thanks to you Rastaman for sharing this knowledge with us, im working on different ways of rendering ZBrush Models in VrayForC4D, and your way seems to be the most promising.
But I cant get it to work.
You mentioned, that you where working with Auricks way of creating a displacement map. I searched for it, but couldnt find the thread.
If someone could tell me where to find Auricks way, maybe i can finally get your special-map to work.

sorry for double post, i didnt know that this forum needs some hours to show new posts, so i thought there was some error or something, so I posted again.

[Mezmerrizer]

whats up here? is the forum down or the thread closed or what?

[Rastaman]

Hi Mezmerrizer, your very first post was maybe checked by the moderator, usually all posts are shown up in realtime.
Welcome in the forum.

To your question:
Please read my step-by-step carefully again, it should also work with you if you use ZB 3.1 (PC-Version).
Aurick simply describes to set the morph-tag at subd-level 1 before initiating the disp-map-creation-process, that's all.
Try again with my advices, you should get results.

[qifafiq88]

can i hav this tutorial??i need step by step...pls