Hey guys, I tried goggling around but I’ve got a headache and I just want clarification about a few things. I am using Maya 2010 but I assume that the work flow is the same everywhere.
I made a basic model in Maya 2010, brought that into Zbrush and had about 6 layers of smooth, and started working on it. Then using the UV master I laid out the UVs really easily which was so fantastic and exported the model back to Maya. It seems to work and my general plan to rig is basically like this.
Level 1 -
Base mesh for rigging and used as a Wrap Deformer
Level 2 -
Mesh to be controlled by Wrap Deformer from level 1 and Displacement Maps and Normal Maps to take model to Level 6 at this point.
I figured this would allow an animator to work on the base mesh and if the model does change to a certain degree. All I need is a blend shape to switch the level 2 mesh and everything should work nicely. Is this what everyone is basically doing?
As for the next question -
For the Displacement. It can’t replicate whatever we see in Zbrush in Maya sometimes due to resolution of the displacement maps right? So we need the normal map to continue the remaining detail?
If so, how do i get the normal map to all add minor details from where the displacement left off? or are they both created at the same time? Since the Map Exporter seems to create it all at the same time.
Another thing is the SurfaceNoise -> if you tried using the noise function, it looks great but when you hit apply to mesh, the resolution of the mesh basically will never be high enough to support the noise detail and the end result looks different when that button is hit.
Is there a way around this so you get exactly what you see? I’ve seen the tutorial where they made a tile-able cobble path but this situation is a little different ain’t it as we can’t use the Normals Matcap?
How do you add rust and all that detail on a character and leave that to the normal map?
The exporter plugin that pixologic released is awesome but it seems to just calculate everything based of the difference from level 2 till 6? Am I wrong?
Thanks in advance for the clarification. I just want to better understand the Zbrush pipeline in production.