ZBrushCentral

Normal Mapping Best Practice

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello,

First off, I use Blender as my actual 3D tool, and ZBrush for well… everything aside for animation.

Since I’ve finally gotten down normal mapping (conceptually) I’m confident enough to know how to you achieve it. However, all of my normal maps look like utter garbage in Blender. In a year i’ve made roughly 100-200 that have turned out nearly identical in terms of quality.

(Originally I was going to post 3 examples, but honestly it’s not even recognizable. The normals don’t even line up with the mesh in 2 / 3)

If I get a normal map from someone, it works -somewhat- but my own normal maps are absolutely garbage. Whether i bake normals in zbrush or blender, the maps come out the same and it’s disgusting both ways.

My general workflow is:

Base Mesh Creation,

Add Sculpt to Base in Zbrush,

Create Normal, save as 2048 / 1024 (flip them over as well so UVs align in Blender),

Apply to the material at Geometry = 1.0

Afterwards, I’m greeted with a horrible normal mapped smile that looks almost as bad as it is depressing. I know it’s not supposed to look exactly like a sculpt, but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to look similar.

My question(s) is:

  • Is it better to pull out a mesh or push it in when sculpting for normals?

  • What is the distance limit that you can pull away from the mesh before it looks awful?

  • Also, how do you get better normal maps in Blender?

Thanks for any help with this!

#2

  1. Doesn’t matter. What matters is making sure you’re working with angles, a perfect extrusion doesn’t show in a normal map, but a bevel will show just fine.

  2. Distance is relative. Again, this depends on the maximum viewing angle, distance, lighting, etc. You can push a normal map pretty far before you totally break it.

  3. No clue.

#3

Thanks for your response. Clarified a lot!

I’ve had this issue in Blender for so long that I specifically started sculpting around the issue as much as possible, and it’s not very easy, considering the amount of surfaces that I wanted to have texture.

I’m semi-in-the-middle-of smashing my head against the wall,though, because for some reason I never understand what I do wrong until I post a thread asking about it. Then I look like a fool when I have a eureka moment thirty minutes later when everyone’s read the original question lol…

My Blender normal map issue was a mix of the Specular and Overlapping UVs… I’ve always made my own half-assed UVs, but now with UV Master the even-spacing yields a much-desired result, and now I can say that it’s working as intended.

The specular on the material can interfere greatly with the visual placement of the detail in my horrendous experience. Getting rid of that slved a lot.