Hello,
This is my first post on the ZBrush Central forums and quite a long read so please have patience as I need your help.
I have a problem that I need help with regarding subdivision levels and texture baking in zbrush. I have searched the forums and the internet for a solution but couldn’t find anything.
So, let me explain the problem. Let’s say I have created a basemesh in 3ds Max of an armor piece which I want to bring in to Zbrush for detailing and later bake the difference between the basemesh and highest subdiv to get a displacement map.
So I import the basemesh (which is the final topology of the armor piece, not just a basemesh made for sculpting convenience), store a morph target, subdivide and start sculpting away.
I spend a solid amount of time adding hard surface details, screws, refining all the detail and making it look neat until I’m done and now I need to bake the maps. I switch back to the lowest subdivision level only to find out the basemesh is completely altered so baking the difference between the altered basemesh and the highest subdiv level would be useless for me as I wouldn’t be able to use the map on the base mesh in 3ds Max.
So I try and switch the morph target in order to retrieve the original basemesh, but once I return to the highest subdivision, and switch back to the lowest again the mesh is altered once more. I try switching/storing the morph target a few times and I finally do get my base mesh to stay the same as in the begining, but now the highest subdivision level is deformed.
You get the picture, the lowest and highest subdiv level are connected so whatever change is made to the highest directly modifies the lowest subdivision level and I can’t have that happening. I can’t find a way to bake a displacement map between the low-poly mesh from max and detailed highest subdivision level. I could export the altered basemesh back to max, but this doesn’t work with armor as even the smallest sculpted detail (like a screw) on the highest subdiv level portrudes a vertex outward on the low poly mesh and armor is not organic so it needs to stay flat and clean.
This is literary driving me crazy and I don’t know how to solve it. Back when I was using Mudbox I could re-import the basemesh and the highest subdiv wouldn’t get deformed so then I would bake a displacement map between the two.
I could hypothetically export every part of the model to Xnormal and bake it there but as far as I know Xnormal doesn’t do 32bit EXR displacement maps and also it would take loads of time and hard drive space.
Anyways, please help me find a solution for this, is there a way to retain the original shape of the base mesh so I can bake the displacement map I need? Or is there any kind of workaround?
Thank you for your time, and sorry for the long read.