Any way to avoid banding/stepping with 16 bit displacement alpha in zbrush?

PredatorGSR

I have a high res mesh in zbrush.  Using xnormal, I baked a 16bit tiff displacement map from that model.  I then imported that displacement map into zbrush as an alpha, and used DragRect to draw it onto a plane.  The result looks great, except for fine detail stepping all over the model.  Does anyone know any way to fix the stepping while retaining this workflow? It doesn't appear that zbrush will accept a 32 bit image as an alpha, so baking a 32bit map doesn't seem like it would be a solution.  

Any ideas?

lsebastian

Hello, i have exactly the same case like you. I try your solution in this ->THREAT but unfortunatelly its no work for me.

Its old post but let me tell you what i doing in Photoshop to make disappear this stepping in Zbrush, when you made height  map 16bit .tiff  using xnormal.

1. When save for .tiff format:

- convert to greyscale,

- now when you export to .tiff, in pop-up window in save option, you must uncheck "Alpha Channels" and check "As a Copy" ( anyway as a copy check automaticly when you turn off alpha ),

- in second pop-up window, in Byte Order section change on "IBM PC" ( macintosh are wrong ) , rest setting  defoult.

2. When save for .psd format:

- like above ...

gnoop

Zbrush seems could only work reliably with psd files.    Try to save your displacement as 16bit grayscale psd with a single channel.     

Or RGB 32 bit exr file. It's also working for displacement in Zbrush

lsebastian

But i check me self on windows7. My solution show, that Zbrush can also import properly tif files for alpha map.

lsebastian

gnoop said:

Zbrush seems could only work reliably with psd files.    Try to save your displacement as 16bit grayscale psd with a single channel.     

Or RGB 32 bit exr file. It's also working for displacement in Zbrush

No, exr  file cannot be import to zbrush 4R7 P3 for alpha (if i good understend you ...)

I looked at EXR  more closely. I render two height map 4K in xnormal, tiff and exr, on this same setting. Then i conwert in PS tif map on greyscale and save to .tif file, the same proces for exr but i change to 16 from 32bit and save to .psd file.

I use both map in ZBrush, on EXR appear some ragget line ( im not sure but maybe also more noise map is ), while TIF have nice streight equal line ( here in ZBrush i increasse Z Intensity, but its no have matter ).

I dont know maybe my PS CS5 Extendet have bad compression from 32 to 16, i no check yet this in Gimp to have  campare... or maybe EXR are little worse.

In lower 100% scale map.