I'm so tired of this...

[Djordr]

Sculpting is easy
Retopology is easy with topogun
Exporting textures from zbrush…half of the textures are blocky or have a bunch of artifacts.
Putting on a displacement map to recover the high res look of the sculpt in blender…

I have been doing this for some time and first now do I realize that the huge grind in my gears and I bet a lot of other peoples gears is taking a model from zbrush, export all the maps correctly and put them in an all purpose 3d program like blender or I guess maya or 3ds max.

I have looked around and there seems to be few if any tutorials on how to do this easily, the artifacts are one thing, sometimes you get smooth looking displacement maps but other times they’re divided up in squares as if they’re cut off where the polygons are. I don’t know why this is but it’s annoying when you have 12 subtools and you’ve got to mess around with, the displacement is another thing.

I don’t know if this is an issue with blender or the maps that zbrush exports but when I put on my displacement maps blender the result is less than satisfactory. How are you suppose to know how strong the displacement is, there is a slider but how would you recreate the amount of displacement neccessary for the model to look like it does in zbrush?

What I want to do is ditch the blocky game resolution model and just make it a few thousand polygons higher in resolution to make it look more like the sculpted mesh before I start coloring it. I have asked on the blender forums about it and while they helped me point out why the model looks wack when i render it there is no explanation of how to get an accurate good result.

I’ll have to reorganize stuff and try make things work but man sometimes this 3d stuff is unintuitive:

Sculpting
Retopologizing
Uv mapping

Displacement maps
Spec maps
(Other maps, roughness etc, what the hell are these for)
Fine details, pores, etc.
Hair

Fix it developers! It seems like the stuff marked in red you have to cheat or fake your way through, seems to be no straightforward way to do it. It’s like a secret art only known to people who make billions on games and holywood movies and something not meant to be known by mere mortals.

[beta_channel]

Alright…this might take a bit.

Sculpting - actually the only hard part.
Retopo - boring and tedious (probably the longest part of this process after sculpting)
UV Mapping - way more important for games than cgi. You can blame your GPU for this.

I’m glad you’ve got these figured out, cause that’s the brunt of what you need to worry about.
Now on to the things you’re struggling with.

Displacement maps - the long and short of it, don’t bake in Zbrush. Zbrush has tools to allow for it, but as you’ve noticed, how do you guage the depth, etc of the mesh to determine what settings to use in your renderer of choice. You simply can’t. Mental Ray, Vray, Octane, Marmoset, UE4, etc all use different values and inputs, so getting a map out of Zbrush is a waste IMHO. If you’re working in Blender, bake in blender.

Spec maps - these are made to mimic real world specular values. They’re important, but not that important anymore with PBR taking over. And on that note…

Roughness maps, etc - PBR is a rather simply process that takes a lot of the guess work out of texturing for an artist and allows them to actually focus on making something look cool, rather than “correct”. Metal/Roughness is one model and Spec/Gloss is the other. These two things basically tell the render engine if an object is made of metal (has a colored reflection, or a diffused reflection) and how reflective that surface is (how broad the highlight, fall off, and reflection value) You can basically say, is this made of metal? yes or no? Is this reflective? how much? Then tune your values to fit.

Instead of trying to figure out what color something is, we can scan it, mimic the real world and just simply have it exist. There are programs out there that help with this. Quixel has a nice plug in for Photoshop. Substance Painter and Designer are great tools for this as well. Mari, 3Dcoat, etc.

Fine details, pores, etc. These things change depending on how you’re going to be showing your work. Movies can do a bunch of 8k+ maps per object to allow for super upclose shots. Games, not so much, we use tiling detail maps, etc to achieve a similar look, but in realtime.

Hair…well, hair sucks. 100’s of thousands of strands of hair, just for your head, rendered in realtime or prerendered doesn’t really matter. That’s a lot of data to keep track of, and have physics on, etc. But there are tools out there to help with this as well. Shave and a Haircut, Ornatrix, Hair Farm, etc are all different tools for generating hair. And there are even more out there, this was just the first 3 I could think of.

Anyway. I hope this helps you get out of your funk.