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GoZ To Maya Displacement Map Issue

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’ve just recently purchased Maya 2011 and have been working on using GoZ. Everything went well until I started trying to export displacement maps from ZB to Maya. The displacement map shatters the surface of my model. (Apologies for the ugly Rhino test model. I’ve learned not to invest a lot of time until I know what I’m doing).

As it appears in ZB:

I’ve had a fair amount of experience manually exporting models with displacement maps to Carrara. What I found in that case was that the maps were much too intense and would similarly shatter the surface. In order to make ZB displacement maps work in Carrara I overlaid a 98% opaque white layer in Photoshop before importing into Carrara. That would tone them down so that they worked properly.

Is there a displacement map intensity setting in Maya 2011 that is causing this problem? I am using the base settings in both ZB and Maya as far as I know. I have tried several different tools and get the same surface effect each time.

Thanks in advance for your help.

#2

Can you provide some of your settings in Maya (approximation settings, render settings)? Are you rendering with mental ray?

Make sure your uv’s are merged in Maya. I believe if the Mrg button inside the export settings in the tool menu in Zbrush is unchecked, your uv’s in maya will all be separated. Meaning each face will essentially be it’s own uv shell. This is just a guess as to what could be causing it.

#3

A response! Thanks for taking the time to write!

I’m 99% ignorant of Maya’s ways. I’ll dig into the render and displacement settings tomorrow and post my findings.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my elementary problem. The only thing I hate about learning new things is being clueless for a period of time.

#4

My ZBrush export settings. “MRG” was checked.

#5

The displacement issue in Maya was that I was rendering with Maya Software instead of Mental Ray. Switching to Mental Ray solved the problem. Thanks skdzines for the tip.

The online documentation for displacement maps is way out of date. I appreciate that ZBrush keeps evolving (and getting better!) but the multiple versions covered or not covered in the online docs makes learning ZBrush way more confusing than it needs to be.

#6

Amen to that