Hi everyone - this is me right now - :o
The explanation:
I am working on a short film project, and one of the characters is a talking tree. In order for the tree to be as detailed as possible, I modelled in zbrush, and after having laid out UV shells in their respective squares, I have spend the past few days texturing the tree in zbrush. In order that I could texture the tree at its highest possible resolution (millions of polys per branch/trunk) what I did was I split the tree, using the uv shells into separate ztools. This allows me to subdivide each piece so I get a great amount of detail out of each peice. After exporting normal maps, I noticed although the smooth normals was ticked, the edges inside the eyes and mouth were still very visible, so I was worried if I smooth the model in maya during render, the normal map wouldn’t stay smooth along my model. When I subdivided my model in zbrush, I noticed the uv borders move , because the model was split into peices, so in an attempt to stop the borders from moving, before I modelled anything, i saved morph targets for the model, which afterwards, I masked out everything but the edges, and morphed them back to their original location before exporting the maps.
The problem:
I am currently trying to export normal maps from zbrush, but am running into issues regarding the uv borders, and confusion regarding the ‘smooth uv’ function. When I try to create normal maps from the lowest subd to the highest, although smooth normals is ticked, i still get hard edges showing up in my normal maps as seen below.
As you can see, around the eyes and mouth the sharp edges. So, I thought, this is due to the uvs not being smoothed, but the problem is, when I smooth the UVS, the borders of the shells suck in, and no longer fit my model when I place the normal maps either in maya, or mari.
I was thinking, do I have to repaint border edges? Do I have to somehow use the smooth uv option in zbrush? I know that in order for my textures to smoothly run across my low res .obj, i have to have smooth uvs, but why does zbrush say - ‘smooth uv function retains the original uv borders place’ if it doesn’t? I am sure I am doing something wrong, but am having the most difficult time wrapping my head around the many possibilities of what method would simply place my normal map on my low res models without giving me a headache!
Thank you! Tom