Pore details - sculpting or texture?

SuperFranky

Does anybody have experience with these two methods of creating pore details for skin? Which method is the fastest and yuilds the best results? Sculpting in Zbrush is nice, but you have to be aware of polygon restrictions and details can be lost in the baking process. Paining pore texture in Photoshop and converting it into a normal map seems like a good way to get good crisp details, but I can imagine it being a bit unintuitive and if UVs aren't perfect it cage get bad results.

What do you think?

AshuraDX

I'd paint the pores using the 3d functions in photoshop to paint my bump map direclty on the model - or do the same in mudbox or Substance painter
Zbrush should be capable of doing that aswell

just paint it in 3d to avoid UV issues, then export and convert the painted bump map to a normal map

SuperFranky

Ok, I looked into painting bump map in Zbrush and it looks good. But to use that I would need a set of finished UVs for my model, right? Can I just bake down those details to low poly?

JohnnyRaptor

I believe he means 3D paint the pores on your lowres, uv mapped mesh. That way you avoid getting distortions due to your unwrap.

also, if you want to paint in zbrush, you dont need UVs, but you would have to paint it on your highres mesh, export the highres with the polypaint, and then use something like xnormal to transfer the colour to your unwrapped lowpoly mesh.

SuperFranky

Thanks for suggestions, guys, I'll try it all

jfitch

You may not still be looking for an answer on this but I'd say model it into your high res and use a repeating pore texture as well.

SuperFranky

jfitch wrote: »

You may not still be looking for an answer on this but I'd say model it into your high res and use a repeating pore texture as well.

Thanks for the suggestion, maybe I'll give it a shot