Zbrush materials in xnormal

Composition--C

Hey, I got a question about getting zbrush materials on a game model, so here goes:

I have a low and high poly model that I export to xNormal to get my normal and AO maps. The low-poly is UV unwrapped, of course. Now the high-poly model is unwrapped too because I also create a texture map inside of zbrush that has the materials baked into it from the high-poly model. When I load up the normal map and AO map inside of Marmoset, the high-poly model will be projected on the low-poly model. If I use the material texture map that I created in zbrush as a diffuse map, will those materials from the high-poly model project correctly onto the low-poly model?

cryrid

By the time you have a material baked into the texture of a sculpt, you could convert it to polypaint and just export that instead of having extra UV data on the sculpt.

And you can use xnormal to bake the color of the highpoly onto the UVs of the lowpoly (using polypaint or a texture if you insist on using it). For polypaint you need to uncheck "ignore-per-vertex-color", and use the "Bake Highpoly's Vertex Color" option. For a texture, you need to assign it to the high poly (base texture to bake) and use the bake base texture option.

Lastly, it should be noted that you techically wont have a material in the end. The instant you try converting the material to a texture it becomes just that; a static texture. There are a few uses for it, but more often than not it's not going to look anywhere near as good as you might hope since it's no longer dynamic looking. If your goal it to create the same kind of material effect that you see in zbrush, you might want to look into using a matcap/litsphere based shader in your engine instead of trying to bake it to a diffuse texture.

Composition--C

Thanks for the advice!! I've been debating as to whether or not I could do game graphic since my ability to draw by hand is about a bad as it gets. So, I try to get around that by using materials as much as possible and keep the hand painting to a minimal...maybe I should try creating models for movies and television. I hear that artists in that industry use whatever materials and tools they can muster up in 3DS or Zbrush.

With that said, do you have any advice that you could share as to what I should do (movies or games)? I've been modeling for about 3 months and I'll take any help I can get :-)

almighty_gir

baking matcaps to textures:

http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/zbrush/baking_texturemaps/baking_texture_maps.html