ZBrushCentral

Baking out Matcaps! (tutorial/step by step added)

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#1

So I have been looking for a way to bake Matcaps for a while and have had no real luck. well yesterday I had one of those flux capacitor moments and came up with a solution in Zbrush that actually works! (Someone has had to come up with this solution before I did but I have never seen or read anything about it.)

Anyhow here is a link to a quick tutorial I wrote up on the process (Tutorial is created in all images so they can easily be saved.) I am also going to attempt to also link the images to this thread.

The solution is super fast and generates textures that I usually hand off to other people to paint :slight_smile:

Link: http://www.piggyson.com/tutorial_matcap/

matcap_header.jpg

Hopefully these images work :slight_smile:

-Piggyson

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#2

:+1: :+1: awesome tut thanks for this :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

#3

yeah thats an excellent tutorial piggyson. Thanks mate :+1:

#4

yeah that’s much cleaner than the ZApplink way! Thanks :slight_smile:

#5

Great ! thanks for sharing.

#6

Hey Piggyson! Thanks for sharing this amazing workflow with the community. I guess we all have at some point or another been on the verge of a great workflow discovery, but you have actually done it. thanks again.

#7

Sweet jebus this just blew my mind. Great stuff thanks so much for sharing.

#8

Good tuto

You actually dont need image plane to fill you’re document:

Generate a disp map of the document size (1024x1024)
With the selected alpha, and matcap you want to bake, at the bottom of the alpha tab, select your alpha depth factor (intensity of your displacement)
and press crop and fill.
Your document will be filled:

http://sebleg.free.fr/tutorials/zbaking.html

#9

Great job putting this together Joe! Being able to bake out a texture with a matcap so smoothly opens up a lot of possibilities (i.e. some really cool results for spec/glow/sub-dermal maps).

#10

To Sebcesoir:

Yeah this was one of the methods I messed with years ago when you posted it. Now I may be doing something totally wrong but I could only get the alpha depth method to get the matcap values on a certain color (I couldn’t get it to allow for the texture+displacement option, and my Photoshop comping of the texture+matcap lighting layer left a lot to be desired.)(Having to change the alpha depth factor and hitting crop and fill everytime also drove me a little nuts, I like the intensity slider a bit better :slight_smile: )

alphadepth.jpg

When using the displacement effect on a Polymesh Plane3D object you can also subdivide it and then apply the displacement (However it’s back to being tedious like crop and fill.) You now end up with a tangable peice of geometry you can smooth out, sculpt some more on, creatively mask etc…)

#11

this is like a great leap in zbrush and 3d texturing. Well done cant wait to try this! :+1:

#12

Please excuse my ignorance. Can some one please quickly explain what this tutorial is producing? Is this just using zbrush as photoshop, allowing you to lay out your maps on a flat plane and do your texturing?

I am not trying to be sarcastic or put this technique down, I apologize again for my ignorance. I understand the technique and how to do it, im just not clear on what its benefits are. Thanks for the tut!:+1:

#13

Hi Piggyson! Thanks for sharing this great tutorial! :+1: !

#14

Great tutorial. The image plane trick is a good way to paint/sculpt on your unwrapped mesh or use projection master like in sebcesoir architectural tutorial.
Really hope Pixo will add all this tricks as a simple button push in a futur version :rolleyes:

#15

I like when things are a little esoteric. It weeds out the lazy people :slight_smile:

db

#16

Aberrant - This allows you to matcap information as well as your texture information. I think for most of us it was impossible to get the likeness of the zbrush materials exported, you would need to recreate the zbrush material in your target application.

#17

I see, so this is more of a way to take the color information + shader flattened to color information again. I was not quite sure if this was the case or if it was meant for something different. Thank you very much for the response. I know it was almost a rhetorical question given the title of the thread “Baking out Matcaps!” hahahah. I guess it took some one else to say the same thing for me to get it :stuck_out_tongue: My brain has a few wires crossed.

On top of baking out matcaps it looks like its an alternative for photoshop by using polypaint, and also giving you zbrush’s cavity masks and other handy tools to detail your maps.

Not it also makes sense when photoshops lighting effects are mentioned in the first post. Trying to use the displacement map to re-create the way light hits the forms…

Once again thanks for the response!

#18

after a little experimentation I figured out a workflow to use this method with a normals map texture:

  1. convert your normals map to a displacement map. I used Crazybump. Be sure to set it to save as 16-bit image in the preferences, an 8-bit image will look terrible when you crop & fill. Crazybump will save the 16-bit image as a TIFF, which Zbrush doesn’t support, so you would need to open the TIFF in Photoshop (or similar) and re-save it as a PSD.
  2. import into Zbrush as an Alpha and follow the above crop & fill instructions. I set my Alpha Depth Factor to 200 and it worked pretty well, but I suppose it would depend on your image.