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ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Alright, so I’m confused, and it’s about something pretty basic.

It’s all about import and export procedures, and the necessity of morph targets or cages. I’ve spent the last several weeks trying to work out why my models in Lightwave were bloating when applying ZBrush displacement maps to them. After much forum posting and searching, yesterday I landed on aurick’s very helpful posts about using stored morph targets, or import the original mesh into lv1, or using cages:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=27854&highlight=restore+cage

Which I get and I think works great.

Where I’m confused is how for the past several years of ZBrush tuts I’ve watched or read, almost unanimously all of them said that if you don’t want to switch morph targets, you can instead just export the new lv1 mesh after you’re done, and in most cases, that’s preferable because it it contains low level changes from sculpting. And yet, this export does nothing to stop your displacement maps from calculating incorrectly because of the changes in your lv1 mesh.

So what’s correct and what isn’t? Any chance you can clear this up aurick?

#2

If your sculpting has made dramatic changes to the model, then you’d want to use a cage mesh. This is because the cage can compensate for those changes. But if your work is more standard type stuff, the morph target or re-import method is the way to go.

#3

But in all cases, one of those needs to be used, correct?

Meaning, is it an incorrect practice to simply go back to level 1, make a displacement map, and export an obj without either swapping a morph target, reimporting the original mesh, or using a cage?

#4

That is correct. You need a cage mesh in order to have the best results from displacements. So you need to use one of those three methods to get a cage before the map is calculated.