I was watching chapter 4 of Zbrush Character Creation with Scott Spencer. He shows this technique which involves directly painting a bump map. He gets very fine details too without a ton of geomtery. Is it possible to combine a bump map created this way with a normal map, into a single texture?
And is there still no way to export out hd geometry as a normal or displacement map?
It’s not yet possible to export HD details.
Regarding the use of a bump map to generate normal maps, that became obsolete with ZBrush 3. A 4K map has no more than 16 million pixels of data. That means the most detail it can possibly hold is equivalent to a 16 million poly model. And that’s with 100% of the texture space actually used. Most UV maps wasted about 25% of the texture space, which means that a model of 12 million polys holds the same detail that a texture of 4096x4096 can hold. So a bump map can’t add any more detail than what the model can already support.