Is there a feature like zbrush Zgrab in 3ds max?

pixelquaternion

Hi guy's,

I am not new to 3ds max but is there a similar feature to grab the zdepth from a 3d object to use as displacement?

I often use rtt in Max but the heightmap even with correct elevation setup in projection do not yield the correct result, it's flat without any relief.

Maybe there is a script but so far Googling it without any success.

musashidan

You can render a Zdepth pass from the camera. Adjust the near/far planes to suit.

poopipe

 if you bake to a high bit depth format you can usually get away with auto levelling the image after. 

I'm sure I managed to get good height bakes out of max RTT in the past so it might be worth fiddling with more numbers just in case. 

musashidan

Another old-school method I just remembered is to render an ortho camera with a procedural gradient map applied to the mesh(turn off gamma for more range in the blacks/whites)

poopipe

That might have been what I ended up doing actually..

So.. 
On all the high res objects together ...  planar map a gradient to the up/down axis in the diffuse channel and bake out with RTT

I like keeping it within RTT as opposed to ortho cameras because you know things can't get moved

pixelquaternion

Thank for the replies and tips guy's but i was hoping for a real quick and easy way as in zbrush but i guess i will keep it with rtt since last night i had better result with changing to 32 bit exr format but the test i did with the tif 32 bit generate banding.

The zbrush result are far superior even after tweaking my setting and adjusting level in Photoshop.

musashidan

@poopipe yeah mate, that's it. But it's been so long since I did either of the things I mentioned that I'd almost forgotten about them.

@pixelquaternion The banding is as a result of how black/white gradients are viewed in a linear workflow. It's best to disable gamma and render it using scanline.


But yes, Zbrush is just a 1-click-done solution. And the results are great.

pixelquaternion

musashidan said:

@poopipe yeah mate, that's it. But it's been so long since I did either of the things I mentioned that I'd almost forgotten about them.

@pixelquaternion The banding is as a result of how black/white gradients are viewed in a linear workflow. It's best to disable gamma and render it using scanline.


But yes, Zbrush is just a 1-click-done solution. And the results are great.

Thank for the tip and it's a shame we don't have such an easy feature in 3ds max for the price we pay!