Zbrush Tilable Wall Normals

SelwynPhillips

Hi there, I'm working on a tilable wall in Zbrush. For a first attempt at an environmental prop in Zbrush I don't think it went too badly (plenty of room for improvement though).

At first I just UV mapped the bricks in Zbrush and imported the low poly mesh, with normal map, into Maya. Quite simply the normal map looked terrible so I UV'd the bricks in maya and reimported it to see if it was my low poly mesh causing the bad normal map. It didn't work:

Low poly bricks with normal map applied in Maya

For a while I just worked with what I had and made a wall out of the various bricks. Aside from the detail from Zbrushes normal map, the normal map came out quite well. The light caught the protruding bricks very nicely. The wall also tiles very well too.

Basically I want to go back and get a good normal map out of Zbrush but I'm stumped as to what could be causing it to look so bad. I'm not very familiar with Zbrush so I could be missing something obvious. Anyone got any ideas?

Once I've got over this hurdle I can get on with the texturing in photoshop and call it a job well done...

Thanks for your time

cryrid

Just a little note, but when you're aiming for a seamless texture, you don't have to give each brick UVs and a normal map. You can take the detail and normal map information straight from the 2.5D document.
http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/lesson/environment-with-tate-mosesian/

SelwynPhillips

Gave it breif look. looks very useful. Thanks