ZBrush - Now what?
Hello, I have (kinda) finished my (first) model wich is Finn's Sword from Adventure Time. The thing now, is that I would wish to do something with it, and for this, I need to lower polys and use maps to run it elsewhere than ZBrush.
The thing is that I don't know how to make the normal and displacement maps because It says it requires the lowest poly sublevel, but it's all Dynamesh, so there isn't any sublevels. I have a mediocre level of knowledge about 3D modelling because I'm learning on the fly, so I have no idea on how I can do it.
I would appreciate help.
Thanks!
(I'm leave some images, if you see anything too awful please tell me to try to fix it)
The thing is that I don't know how to make the normal and displacement maps because It says it requires the lowest poly sublevel, but it's all Dynamesh, so there isn't any sublevels. I have a mediocre level of knowledge about 3D modelling because I'm learning on the fly, so I have no idea on how I can do it.
I would appreciate help.
Thanks!
(I'm leave some images, if you see anything too awful please tell me to try to fix it)
Replies
If your question was about the baking process specifically this is the tutorial I used for my adventure character: [ame="
Don't know about how that new remesher thing would do with such an object.
Most likely you would be better off just making a lowpoly from scratch (in max for example).
Just to not automate it, it's a simple object to model, and as I read it, you are fairly new to modelling, so I think it's important to at least do it manual at first, just to think about how many sides you would give the cylinder, how much triangles to give to certain parts.
Because the automated tools might not always be available, or being able to judge/fix what the automated tools give you.
same with unwrapping.
For baking normal maps if I was you I would look into baking in max/maya or have a look at xnormal (lot's of tutorials to find about this)
If you want to stay in zbrush, it is easy enough to use zsphere retopo and use another app for unwrapping. A good free one is blender, UVs are fairly simple to work with in it. I tend to use 3d coat most of the time anymore (then go back to blender to get more precise arrangement etc), so that's another one to look into, it doesn't really get much more intuitive.
For normal and displacement, most people use xnormal, its free and it works. It's also pretty simple, so you're not having to navigate a huge 3d app just to get some decent bakes.
There's no real need to maintain UVs. The sculpt doesn't even need them at all, only the final low poly.
Polygroups are the key to that one. Uv Master has been spitting out tons of usable UVs for me as a result
As far as I know, to get this to a game or something I need a low poly model, wich will have maps (disp, normal, texture). I have this badly incorporated model wich is 1.5 million points.
I can decimate the model to get the low poly, and put it to 5k (or less) points with no problem. The thing I have a doubt about it is how do I get the maps now? To do it inside ZBrush I need a high and low poly inside a same subtool. Does that program xnormal work in this case?
In order to try to get a subtools with sublevels I imitated this video I found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TvNhU8_cJM&feature=youtu.be
I tryed it but I just get a model full of holes. I checked for errors on the high poly mesh and there are none I could see, I even tryed dynamesh all over it to effectively close it up, because some people said that it would fix this "holes" but not the case, I get the same result.
I'm getting tired
And thanks for some advices in here, I now realize that this would have been simple if the process would have been differente
I probably wouldn't use Decimation Master for the final mesh, as it will be pretty messy and not necessarily optimized despite the lower polygon count. Manual retopology for a shape like this shouldn't take long in any program.
Lastly you very likely wouldn't require a displacement map for this. The normal map should be enough.
Perfect, I will try it a moment. I will post with whatever I come out.
Thanks again.
I tryed investigating some of what average normals mean, what UVs do and stuff to get my theory right but I can't handle it yet.
I got xNormal installed, loaded a the 2 meshes, and hitted "Generate Maps" and received this:
Any help? Someone understands what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!
From what I see, you have a lot of empty/unused space on your UV sheet. You should try to pack the UVs islands into a square and uniformly scale them so they fill up the 0-1 UV space, so you can bake more details in the texture.
Also, the UVs shouldn't overlap (it looks ok, but it's just to be sure).
The previous normal was with the option "Match UVs" off, then with "Match UVs" on I get a blank image. Maybe my exportation is floppy?
After this assumption I tryed exporting on 3DS format and got a different result wich looked like this:
Is there a supposed way to export a model from 3ds Max?
I'm an (sorry for the language) asshole, I had the high poly not aligned, I'm just stupid! I'm align it right now. Posting results in a minute
EDIT:
It's not perfect but it looks like a normal map now. Thanks for all the support, it's a great community.
Thanks and just thanks, it's really appreciated