ZBrushCentral

couple of questions

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

First, is it possible to generate an ambient occlusion map in zbrush much like what can be done in mudbox?

Second, when I create my uvs using the uv master plugin (which works nicely), I notice inside of maya that the uv shells(islands) look like they are in tact but they are actually all broken apart. Meaning that if I select a few uvs of my shell and then choose Select > Shell, it only selects a portion of the larger shell. I need to manually go in and select all of the uv edges and perform a move and sew operation in order to easily select a shell and move it around. Why does zbrush do this to my uvs and is there a way to prevent it?

#2

Mask by ambient occlusion in the Tools / masking palette. Then you can create an alpha and save out as an AO texture.
When you export from zbrush select Mrg in the export options.

Richard

#3

Thanks Richard, I’ll give that a try.

#4

how long should masking by ambient occlusion take? My model has about 13 million polys at the highest level. I don’t know exactly how long it took because I ended up going to bed and let it run, but I know it at least took a couple of hours just to generate the ao mask. My system specs are below.

Windows Vista x64
Intel Core 2 Quad 3.0Ghz
8gb of RAM
1gb 9800 GT Nvidia

#5

if you use xnormal instead of zbrush 3.5 mask ambient occlusion . you will only took a minutes than an hour.

#6

AO tends to be pretty soft. You’ll see a significant increase in performance by dropping the subdivision level a step or two and slightly blurring the result in photoshop.