ZBrushCentral

Baking out Layer Detail into Maps

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi all,

I’ve recently run into a workflow stumbling block. I’m creating a worn leather glove, and I’d like to be able to bake out separate sorts of detail into separate maps that I can combine and tweak in Renderman. For instance, I’d want one map to have the displacement for medium sized wrinkles, while another map has the displacement for the finer surface noise and cracks. It’d also be handy to have these separated to use for various masks as well.

Does anyone know the best way to go about separating these types of details in zbrush? I figured separating them by 3D layer would be my best bet, but I have no clue how to then bake the detail found in a layer out as a map. There was also a method I tried involving creating the detail in a morph target and checkign the right button under the multimap exporter, but that didnt seem to give me the results I wanted.

Any ideas or direction would be great, thanks!

#2

I guess I’m missing what you want, but why simply hiding the unwanted 3d layers and baking the normals or displacement is not OK?

#3

I guess what’s been tripping me up is that if I, for instance, bake the displacement map, I’m going to be picking up detail that is inherent in the model regardless of whether or not the layers are active. So let’s say I have a football model with some basic indents for seams, and I create a new layer with the pebbled skin detail. I don’t know how to isolate just the detail in that layer without grabbing the the seams detail that was already on the model.

I was thinking it’s probably possible to bake 2 maps, one with the layer on and one with the layer off, and do some kind of subtractive process in photoshop to isolate the difference between the maps? I need to try it out, but was wondering what sort of workflow others used!

#4

The captured detail is the difference between the lower and higher subdivisions. If both are relatively high only will capture fine details, but also perhaps will force you to have a higher res mess as host, or not (I didn’t check it personally)

Also blending modes between the displacement layers should help, obviously it depends of the software used.