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Newbie question: render to normals, alpha?

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#1

Hi, just purchased ZB2, and upgraded to ZB3 ; it’s fantastic. Seriously great tool.
Having some issues, though; maybe someone here can help me out:

  1. is there a way to render to a normal map? I don’t mean bake from high res to low res geometry. I mean, I want extract a normal map from the canvas. Sort of like how you can extract an depth map. Is that possible? (This is for a game application.) I vaguely recall seeing a tutorial here to that effect, maybe?

  2. Similarly, is there a way to get a nice clean Alpha channel of the canvas?

(Being a newbie, I expected to find both as some option under the >Render>.psd menu. Sort of like how other applications work… but it looks like you have to go to texture or alpha and ‘capture’ it to individual files.)

  1. In ZB3, where can I find ZAPPLINK? I can’t seem to locate it. Is it a separate script to load somewhere?

Any help much appreciated,

#2

  1. aha: have to take your canvas, then brush over it with the ‘normal map material’ then save the canvas. You don’t ‘render’ it at all.

  2. ? still no idea.

  3. looks like Zapplink isn’t released for ZB3, yet…