I’m wrapping my head around the Zbrush workflow and have a very basic question that I’m hoping that someone can answer. I’ve seen the same question posted on other forums but I haven’t seen a satisfying response yet. It’s about ZBrush’s displacement maps and hard edges.
As a workflow test I created a simple cube with a 5x5 poly count on each side in C4D, created my UV map, and exported an .obj to zbrush with Riptide. Once in Zbrush I subdivided 4 times with SMT turned off so that my edges stayed sharp. Without doing any sculpting I reverted back so my original subdivisions and created a displacement map (SmoothUV OFF, 32 bit ON, Mid 0). I would expect the displacement map to be completely black as I haven’t done any sculpting yet but all of the UV edges show a white gradient.
Why would Zbrush create the displacement map this way? I’ve seen others respond that it’s because ZBrush expects you to apply the displacement map to a model with more subdivisions than the one used to create the map but that doesn’t make any sense to me (no detailed explanation was offered). Isn’t the whole point to apply the displacement map to the original low-poly geometry? Is there a way to create a displacement map that can be applied to the original low-poly model without destroying hard edges?