Hi,
After wrestling with the process of creating displacement maps I have finally got something approaching an average result. Throughout my failures I’ve read countless tutorials for ZBrush and other apps, and while my success never seems to match theirs, I CAN make the maps work.
Here’s my problem. I’m using these to make skins for Second Life. As has been noted here, Second Life and many other games don’t use the shading information in the skins to actually light the characters. What you have is basically an image mapped to a model, and the “shaped” lighting you get is the lighting that is painted on.
Well, correct me if I am wrong, but that isn’t what displacement maps are for. The variations in a displacement map are so subtle that human eyes really can’t get the full spectrum of what’s there. We’re left taking the basic “shape” and moving to another program like Photoshop and putting our own moe realistic lighting and shadow in there.
Doesn’t that really defeat the purpose for most of us? After all, we can paint this stuff by hand without ZBrush. I have have seen tutorials on taking flat images of, say, a person’s face, from two or more angles, slicing it, pasting it out flat into a texture. and fixing the seams by hand. That is exactly what I expected to be able to do with ZBrush using the spectacularly realistic lighting.
Instead, I end up with a dull shape that I have to go in and do the realism myself. For those of us with 2d skills, the only reason we’d use something like this is for the realism that is prohibitively time consuming to get by hand. Is there no way for ZBrush to take the model, AS WE SEE IT, and create the image from the rendered output and not the 3d animation?
I’ve made color textures, etc., and without the displacement map the rendered shape is discarded. Is there no way to “set” the model and have everything we see transfer to the texture? To me, using displacement maps for this is using something that was designed to function in a 3d environment, and frankly for most game skinning that isn’t where you end up in terms of textures.
Thanks in advance, and I appreciate your patience if I have overlooked something. I’ve looked through this board and the Internet for days, and the only way I can find to get the rendered lighting into a texture without displacement maps is to take screenshots and piece them together to flatten them out. If there is another way, I’d love to know it, and if there isn’t, I’m really dumbfounded that there isn’t.
P.S. If anyone has examples of 2d displacement mapped textures that DO carry the same overall beauty as the rendered, I’d love to see them. Any help would be appreciated, because at this point I’m packing it in and going back to Photoshop.