Hey guys,
I am new zbrush user and still learning and looking for a better work-pipeline for myself. Have found recently that zbrush can easily generate any map I need. Could you please tell me why people use XNormal to bake normals, AO etc. instead of grabbing them directly from zbrush? As I see grabbing from zbrush works much more faster and looks quite easy when compared with xnormal baking process. Especially when making tileable textures etc. I am sure there must be a reason but I cant find it.
Thanks in advance,
G.
There are certain maps that Zbrush won’t generate and could be needed. Also Zbrush only can do normal from objects with subdivisions, where the detail of the higher subdivision is projected in the lower. Other programs can do it with two different objects with different topologies, something that is not possible in Zbrush.
This doesn’t make less interesting to bake from Zbrush, but simply sometimes is not possible because the reasons above.
Xnormal is being substituted by other programs as substance painter etc.
Three things I like about Xnormal:
- It lets me use completely different toplogies between meshes
- It lets me bake with floating geometry to supplement detail
- It gives me control over the mesh’s vertex normals and the tangent basis of the normal map. Since zbrush doesn’t seem to use vertex normals and has no idea what I’m going to render the final model in, the result is sometimes a guess.