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C4d R12 Normal Maps from ZBrush 4

Having some normal map issues that don’t seem right. Areas around the nose and ear look OK in ZBrush and look OK in C4D until the Normal Map is applied. I made sure it’s a Tangent Map and that the X channel is flipped. Actually the polys that seem off are off no matter how I flip the normal map channels.
Any advice? I’d really like to know why the area around the nose is so bad and how to clean it up.
Thanks
NormalMapC4DZBrush.jpg

pretty sure you want to flip the green channel (y).

Sorry, my bad, I forgot to say that the Y channel is flipped, not the X

avatar_head_normalMapSettings.jpg

what is the smoothing angle on your geometry?

I just checked that. The Phong angle wasn’t set at all. Though when I did enable it and set it to the default 80, it did make some areas around the eyes look different but the nose and mouth are the same. That’s one of those things that I’m not used to in C4d being a former Max user and just setting smooth groups.

ZBrush normal map creation is Tangent/SmoothUV

can you post up the nrml map?

Sure, here’s the normal map with the UV overlay. The only thing that I notice is that one of the worst looking polys is stretched quite a bit. Could that be the problem? Do I maybe just need to edit the UV’s to get everything relaxed more evenly?

uv_normal.jpg

thanks, but I can’t see the areas where the stretching is occuring. Can you repost with the just the normal map?

The stretching in the top of the ear seams to be over lapping UVs

I see what you mean about the possible overlap on the ear. I thought I ran a UV overlap check in ZBrush but I’ll double check it.

avatar_head_NM.jpg

you’re asking your normal map to do too much, you don’t have enough form to support the normal map around the nose.

the overlapping geo is in the actual model, not the UVs

Thanks for that advice. I was afraid of that, but obviously I don’t have that much experience yet in learning to balance what needs to be in the base mesh vs normal map.

Thanks again!