So far I’ve had some decent success with exporting the object from the displacement tutorial and rendering it in Max. However after doing a bit more experimenting with one of my own objects, I’ve discovered that every time I generate a displacement map I get banding in the 16-bit greyscale alpha. This shows up as stair stepping in my Max renders, which is how I discovered it. Loaded various bitmaps in PS for further study and sure enough, banding. I’ve tried various forms of UV mapping in ZB, different displacment bitmap resolutions, all the displacement generation settings in the tool menu, and exporting in all formats (PSD, TIF, and BMP). Nothing seems to help. The effect is very similar to when you have a bitmap with smooth gradients and save in a lossy format like JPG. Any ideas?
We will have some tutorials on ZBrush and Max coming in the practical manual. In the interim, hopefully some of the Max beta testers will jump in here with an answer to your question. What you are describing is typical of an 8 bit map, but shouldn’t be happening with the 16 bit map. The TIFF format should have resolved your problem, unless there’s a setting in Max that is getting in the way.
Retried my experiment and the problem went away. I have a sneaky suspicion that I may have done something wrong / out of order in Zbrush the first time around when generating UV’s maybe, or more likely when using a morph target… yup, later discovered that I should not press switch button twice before generating a map. Going to try and figure out tonight exactly what was causing it.
Alright, here are my results. If I don’t restore the low res morph target, and export the low res displaced model and the map which is based on it, I get banding on the entire model in Max. (Edit: see example below)
If, however, I do restore the morph target, and then export that instead, along with the displacement map based on it, I only get banding in the displaced areas in Max. The rest of the model where there are no displacements are fine.
So basically I’m exporting two different low res models from ZB and two different displacement maps based on whether or not I restore the low res morph target, and am getting different banding results from each. Any ideas? Oh, and I’m applying AUV for the UV mapping first thing upon importing the 3D model into ZB, before subdividing to 7. All suggestions welcome by everyone!
Edit: For anyone interested, the render looks kind of like a contour map, lol. Here is a picture (extreme close up):
Ah hah! I think I figured out where the problem is coming from. It’s all a matter of when you create the AUV tiles. I’ve found that if I import my model and make a morph target first, subdivide, model details, restore the low res morph target, >>then<< apply AUV tiling after that (and not before!), and then generate the displacement map, I don’t get banding in Max! Heh, better test some more just to make sure, but hopefully I got this right now (and in the process help anyone else this may happen to). 
Bah, disregard what I said. It’s not the order after all. In fact I feel kind of silly because it should have been more obvious. It’s coming from the subdivide in ZB. Since I’m just doing some basic testing, I’m using a low rez sphere (only 16 poly’s, too low silly me) which I made in Max and am importing into ZB. When I subdivide it a few times, anomolies begin to appear. The reason I kept missing it was because they were only really noticeable at level 6. It’s almost as the skin of the mesh is tightening each time I subdivide, and when it gets too to tight, it sort of gives/collapses slightly along the lines of longitude (make any sense?). Anyways, I can see the looping stair step pattern (must be moire) if I look closely at the model after dividing and before I do anything else with it. I also generated a displacement map (without doing any detail modeling at all, used spherical UV mapping) and took a look at it in Photoshop. Sure enough, banding. Goes to show how accurate ZB is when it generates it’s maps because the actual physical displacement on the model is almost invisible.
The higher your model’s resolution, the more detailed your displacement and normal maps will be. If your system has enough RAM to support more subdiv levels, adding subdiv levels to the mesh right before following the steps to create the map will result in an even better job.
I have 1 GB of DDR433 (dual channel). Dividing is not the problem. Or is it <raises an eyebrow>? Anyways, more info, posts, and examples by other folks experiencing the same problems in this thread:
http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=014729
I’ve given up for now on trying to figure out what the problem is. Sometimes it does it, sometimes it doesn’t. The problem IS with Zbrush 2.0 though, based on close study of the alpha maps generated.
Hi,
Yeah I’ve been getting the same problem - Max says that it is 16bit, and the model was very subdivided before generating the map.
I can’t see any noticeable banding in the tiff file though - maybe it is a problem with the displacement shift in the Vray modifier?
Cheers 
Try the following: Save the disp map as .psd
Open it in photoshop and save it as tiff. Don’t ask me wy, but works for me!!
<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Save the disp map in ZBrush as .psd. Open it in photoshop and save it as tiff.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Gave your recommendation a try, but didn’t work unfortunately.
Here is a super simple test anyone can do. All you need is Zbrush and Photoshop (or any graphics program that lets you load 16-bit grayscale files).
- Select Sphere3D tool and draw it on canvas.
- Go into edit mode.
- Change initialize settings Hdivide 64 / VDivide 32.
- Create a polymesh from the sphere.
- Clear the canvas and draw the new polymesh on the canvas.
- Enter edit mode, then subdivide the mesh until it won’t let you anymore.
- Switch to division level 1, then click the Uvs button.
- Generate displacement map, export it as a TIFF or PSD, and load into Photoshop.
See the banding? Look closely, it’s there as horizontal lines that are parallel.
Let’s continue this thread here… http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=014729&p=3 so we can keep things organized.
Problem solved! See the thread that visualboo linked to in the post above this one. 
The link to that thread doesn’t work anymore 