So I first learned (or fumbled around with at least) 3D with Lightwave over 10 years ago in High School. Never really made it very far and was too busy with work in a totally different field to keep up with it until now, but there’s one thing I remember quite well. What I always felt I had the strongest understanding of was texturing/rendering, at least from an artistic standpoint, like knowing what the difference between specular and reflective layers were and what went where. On Zbrush though, things just seem radically different, as all the tutorials and specific questions I’ve found essentially imply that all of this gets mashed into just one material. Now I understand you can blend different materials at a border and it averages them across that, but I can’t help but feel like this will be severely limiting to either two options: Have a thousand materials with varying values for each property gradient, or just live with averages across a more reasonable number.
Now I don’t really know for sure how much of a disadvantage that second one really is, with so little experience in Zbrush as a whole, but I guess my simple question is: Is it possible to paint directly onto a diffuse, specular, gloss, reflective, or transparency map in exactly the same way you can with color in Zbrush?
Just rambling thoughts, I suppose you could just use grayscale color and export, but I don’t know if this would really be much different from Photoshopping the exported UV. Looking this up online basically suggested this whole thing is not possible, because different rendering softwares all have their own properties. This really doesn’t make sense to me as it seems that would render all shaders/matcaps useless too. In any case, if someone knows a good solution for my poorly worded question, it would be greatly appreciated.