Does anyone know if you can bake the geometry and texture to a texture in Zbrush? I’m looking for something similar to Maya’s Mental Ray Baking feature. this is different than the normal or displacement mapping that can be extracted from Hi-res Zbrush models.
Thanks,
symco
the answer is yes, and no. Baking in zbrush doesn’t encompass an entire 3d object, like other 3d baking tools. The only tools that encompass an entire 3d object are normal mapping and displacement mapping.
You can bake lighting and materials into a texture, using Projection Master with Shading setting on. This will allow for a few visible surfaces at one time, and would take a few passes to get a complete bake. To do this more than once, you should paint a flat color over your object, to avoid over-baking. I created a simple plug-in to aid in this called “Flat Canvas”. This type of 3d baking is setting dependent, so if you want fibers or shadows baked in, they should be turned on. Using markers, it’s also possible to bake polyframes. Also look at these threads related to baking. Topic: Difference between shader and material
Topic: polyframe to texture? is this possible?
the other type of baking is a 2d layer. You can bake all shading and material info into your 2d layer. Much like a final render