ZBrushCentral

flipped textures

This may be a simple question to answer but I’m wondering why my textures/maps out of zbrush are always flipped backwards when applying them in Maya. The normals are all facing the correct way on the mesh and when looking at the uvs in the UV Editor, the shaded display of the UV’s is blue indicating they are facing the correct way. However, the maps themselves come out backwards. Normal and Displacement maps go the opposite directions. In order to fix it I have to flip the UV’s so they are red for it to work properly.

Is there a switch in zbrush to correct this when generating and exporting?

Thanks!

edit: NM…sorry, I was thinking of something else. Please ignore this post.

Are you talking about flipping the color channels of the textures that represent the data, or flipping the orientation of the UVs themselves? If the former, you can flip the R, G, and B channels by using the little toggles in the Normal Map Subpalette, the MME plugin, and probably in the Importexport NormalMap Preference. These are usually optional and manual toggles in many baking and rendering programs, because how a normalmap interprets a color channel can vary from one program to the next depending on whoever programmed it (there’s no set standard).

I’m not sure if this is the same deal with displacement maps.

I’m not sure how else to explain it or if it is as simple as switching the RGB channels or not. Let me give an example with a color map. In this example, I have a shot of the blue uvs in maya indicating they are facing the correct way, the red uvs indicate they are flipped backwards. My face normals are all pointing the correct way as well as indicated in the zbrush screen grab otherwise you would only see the back faces. You can see from the texture map on the bottom right that the texture is actually reversed, the R & L are flipped. This means if I were to do any kind of photoshop texturing I would need to work backwards. However, this is the only way the textures, normal maps, and displacement maps generated from Zbrush seem to display properly when rendering.

If I were to have my model with the proper uv direction (blue), the texture map with the R & L would not be reversed and would still render properly. However, this is not the case for the normal and displacement maps, the webbing on my spiderman character seem to go inward rather than outward. The only way I can get them to render properly is to have the flipped uvs (red) which then makes my texture maps backwards as mentioned above.

So what I’m basically asking is there a way to flip this in Zbrush so that maps don’t look backwards like they do in this texture example and also render in the correct direction?

uv_example.jpg

Has anyone found how to fix this? I’m having the same problem.