ZBrushCentral

Adding ambient occlusion map to cavity map and add it all into normal map.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi

I read that the cavity map can be incorpertaed into the normal map.

It works, but what if I would like to get ambient occlusion combined (done with 3dsmax render to texture) with the can I some how import any texture to ZMapper and tell it to use that to bake into the normal map.

Then I can first make the cavity map in ZMapper export that.
Do my abient occlusion map in 3dsmax export that.
Blen the to together say in Photoshop
TAke the result back into ZMapper before we do the normal map.
And somehow load it into ZMapper as the cavity map and then make the
normal map with ZMapper where the all the cavity and Ambient occlusion
is stored as well on top of the normal map.

Does it make sense to have ambient occlusion term in the normal map as well? And not only the cavity map?

If not why?

Thanks for any replays.

Liam04

#2

A bump map can be baked into the normal map, but not AO. As I understand things, you wouldn’t want to bake in AO because it’s a completely different rendering effect than normal perturbation and requires a different channel in the rendering engine. Putting them into a single map would mean that neither effect would render right. One map would pollute the other.

#3

My idea was to let shader read the normal map with the (Cavity/AO) and splitt it. So the direction of the normal is set to be used as the normal and it’s length we used for the cavity and ambient occlusion calculation.

I have a hard time understanding whats so differ a cavity and an ambient occlusion map if both are static.

Then it strok me that a cavity normal maps might be usefull directlly with a normal maps shader while if I wanted to have a ambient occlusion term in there as well. I have to have my shader seperating the two normal map and AO/cavity term.

I don’t know it’s speculation. I want to try it but then again I want to insert my AO map to ZMapper so it’s included to the normal map.

Or I have to do my own tool to add it.

Cheers and thanks for the replays

Liam