I love the way you can shade in crevices and cavity areas in Zbrush, and have tried several plugins that supposedly bake that shading into a texture for you.
I have never gotten any of those to work but i did stumble upon a simple method of achieving the same result.
In Lightwave 3D, in Layout’s Surface Editor, on your desired surface, … in either your color channel’s texture panel…
make a Image Map layer, and use an inverted version (negative) of your displacement map. (i reccommend busting up the contrast and messing with the brightness in the negative version you use)
note: you could also just press the “invert layer” button on the layer instead of making it’s image property negative.
use that as an alpha layer above another layer which would be a procedural “Value” (type of procedural pattern which is just a color) and pick a dark shade of the color most prominent in your surface.
You could also just use black. that would work well if you have large color changes in your surface.
If you just use black, then you could also just use a regular (not negative) version of your displacement map (but still contrast-adjusted) and use the “screen” blending mode.
I bet some of you have alredy done something liek this, but I’d just like to share it with those who havent. I find it’s a nice thing to have on your pallet,to work from.