ZBrushCentral

Rendering in Maya using Normal maps.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Doed anyone know how to render in Maya using a normal map that is generated by z brush?

Thanks for the help in advance!

NickZ.

#2

Try www.digital-tutors.com! they have free tutorials about rendering normal maps in maya. I am not sure, but I think it should work in the same way with normal maps from zbrush.

#3

I’m also running into the same problem, digital tutors only show how to make normal maps, like most other places… Getting them to render correctly it’s being a problem. (the render results do not do faith to the realtime results, it appears like burned paper with depth set to 1 in tangent -bump node or really dull and smooth with lower bump depth, must lickely not working. I would like to know if anybody has being sucessful, preferrably rendering normal maps in Mental Ray. People seem to be very good in getting diplacement maps to work but normal maps I’ve not seing any thread about. Well yes, there’s one and it works well, when rendering in Maya renderer

http://www.drone.org/tutorials/normal_maps.html

Although there’s a bug when rendering it in Mental Ray, you will noticed that the texture borders of the mesh tend to have a hard edge, I emailed
Olivier to see if there’s a work around it.

Meanwhile does anybody know of another method?

I would expect that to just work, maybe I need a special Mental Ray shader…

This would be a great help!

kjeld.

#4

Still haveing problems rendeing normal maps in Mental Ray.

Haven’t gotten around this anybody?

#5

i tried the JS_NormalMapper and the shader foudn here: http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/plugins/rendering/mental_ray/lyrid-normal-map-4962.html

but neither of them work.

There HAS to be a way somehow.

#6

Short workflow :

  • Create the normalmap with zmapper loading “Maya_TangentSpaceNode_BestQuality” preset from configpresets. Save out as .psd
    -convert it to 16bit RGB in Photoshop
    -in maya simply apply a blinn to the object and plug the normalmap into bump node. Change the use to “tangent space” and render it out.

Dunno if this is still of use but try it. It worked for me.

#7

Hey Guys

Even we a re facing the same problem.I suppose the normal map genereated from zbrush can only be used into displacement for effectiveresults.Pleasae confirm.

Thanx

#8

load the normal map into the bump channel of a shader, set the bump map dropdown to tangent space normals then it should render fine with mental ray checked in the render settings probably wont render with maya software rendered just mental ray.