Roland, thank you. Your wonderful posts, though of a different style, still share the same technical principles.
@achidotte, thanks.
There isn’t any mystery behind such techniques.
All you need is to bake a panel relief, as displacement map. Easy in zbrush.
- this panel better be constructed by horizontal and vertical edges as possible. Avoid curves.
- Topology has to be clean and of quads only. The excellent z remesher serves well.
- ctrl+shift (lasso mode) can select/hide loops. Such loops can be assigned as polygroups. They can also be extracted as new tools (pallet)
to use a displacement map on UV unwrapped meshes isn’t something new.
- A geometrical (horizontal vertical) pattern - displacement map has to be aligned to the topology (as seen in a UV editor). The way to do so in zbrush, is to UV unwrap the mesh as GUV. (You can always export the obj to another app - UV editor and edit it. More control this way)
Such aligned topology to a geometrical pattern eliminates many artifacts after subd+displacement. But it’s still a boring pattern.
Here comes the loops. Group loops, etc etc. These will curve all these creating more organic forms.
So, we propose, sculpt using topology and UVs aligned to displacement maps.
If such a displacement map is combined with an AO map as well, then, you don’t even need to bake to a low poly mesh for exporting purposes. It’s ready for exporting alright.
A tutorial is here. (made for blender artists forum, but it’s valid for any other app)
More links to help navigation to this rather chaotic thread, bottom of the #2 post - page
Here’s a displacement and a AO map, to play with. It is very important to be a 16bit map at least. 8bit displ maps result to nasty artifacts. Avoid them.
These are 16 bit tiffs, you may need to convert them as PSD 16 bit for zbrush use.
very cool Michalis 
