When ZBrush displays a matcap I guess it is just running some kind of HLSL-like shader on the mesh in addition to its polypaint or texture, right?
Is it possible to bake the matcap vertex color information into the polypaint channel of the mesh?
Say as an example, I have activated the NormalMap matcap on a total white mesh and want to store its color information…
I know, as soon as I rotate the model the vertex coloring would change… but I could imagine a situation where this still would be useful:
Imagine having a highly detailed mesh with horrible topology. And you do not want to mess with the import and reprojection function to bring in the low-poly basemesh (because that would kill the high details in many cases and requires a lot of projection parameter tweaking and fiddling with subtool copies of the original mesh)… so how would you be able to get the normal map then?
Just apply the NormalMap matcap to the hi-def model, rotate the model so that it faces the correct axis and bake the matcap into the polypaint channel.
Once this has been done you could export the model into another app like XNormal and bake the vertex color into the UV layout of the low-def model.
No messing around with projection problems. No subtool copies and morph brush orgies.
I do not know if this would be a feasible approach nor if there are any major flaws in this idea… but I’d like to try it.
So any hints or clues on how to bake a matcap into the polypaint chanel?