ZBrushCentral

Really Confused with Zbrush to Maya normal mapping

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I want to put my high resolution details on my low poly mesh, but I’m having a few problems, and it could be because some of my settings may be wrong but I’m not sure, which is why I’m asking for help. I tried creating a normal and displacement map from my high poly mesh then exporting the base mesh of my character back into maya and applying the skin (which I’ve never done before so I decided to try and test it out,) but the normal map looks TERRIBLE and the displacement map looks almost perfect, but it has seams that I can’t seem to get rid of and also has some odd distortions on it, could anyone please give me some help/advice or point me in the direction of some sort of tutorial that could help me? I’ll provide some images to show exactly what problems I’m having.

Normal Map
normalmap.jpg

Attachments

seams.jpg

distortion.jpg

settings.jpg

#2

what are you rendering in? we can’t help you with displacement settings if you don’t tell us what application.

you need to flip your green channel for your normal map to work.

#3

I’m rendering in Maya.

#4

I tried flipping ALL of those channels individually and it still looks terrible, I checked the normals of the exported model and they look normal, am I wrong?

normals.jpg
normals.jpg1659×935 107 KB

#5

Ok, I went up to the second subD level of my model and it seemed like things were working a little better, but the normal maps still weren’t where I wanted them, so I’m just going to go with the displacement, my question is, with my model being around 16K tris, and using a displacement map, is animation/rendering time going to be a huge pain in the ass?

Topology subD 2
topology.jpg

Attachments

displacement.jpg

#6

Fixed with GoZ, thank God for that add on. The regular maya software renderer was also making it look terrible, had to use mental ray and for some reason reverse the normals.

Normalmapped rendered with MR:

normalmapfixed.jpg

Attachments

lowtopology.jpg

#7

I’m really bothered by the fact that the normal map is working when I export the file as a Maya ascii from Zbrush. (which I then have to reverse the normals on my model and render in mental ray. Is that the only way normal maps looks correct? It looks perfect in the workspace when I put on HQ and texture for previewing.) When I export the model as an OBJ then apply the SAME normal map that looks correct on the maya ascii export, it looks terrible again, I don’t understand what could be wrong, when I modeled this character I didn’t do anything unorthodox or out of the ordinary, the only thing I might have done that would possibly compromise the model is modeled the head seperately and imported an old body I had made earlier then combined them, but still, I should’t be having this many problems, that seems like a pretty routine thing to do. I deleted the history before I sent it into Zbrush as well, which I feel was the proper thing to do unless I’m an idiot and doing things wrong for importing into Zbrush, I figured a clean slate would be better than a model with a bunch of history attached to it. If someone could please help me out, give me some sort of idea where I might have gone wrong that would be awesome, because this problem is literally driving me insane.