Displacements used with normal maps?

obloquy

Hey, I wanted some advice on displacement & normal map workflow when it comes to texturing in substance painter...  

I wanted to apply a noise tillable to a piece of clothing in zbrush and then extract a displacement of it.  Then in SP I don't want to use any normal/bump fabric texture as the clothing already has the right textures from the noise displacement - I just want to paint it etc. 

Do I still follow the low/high poly workflow when it comes to baking in SP  - as in the high poly will have the flat texture detail - and then when it comes to rendering just plug in the displacement map generated from zbrush? I'm a bit unsure of the process as I've seen videos on the benefits of normal vs displacement map but couldn't figure out if you're suppose to use the two combined.... Any advice?  Hope that makes sense.  Thanks

Obscura

Whats the target renderer? Game engines normally require a normalmap too when you use displacement, because the displacement shader won't modify the normals. Also, using raw geometry even in film production is simply very inefficient and you should always work with some lower poly mesh and use displace + normals. A crazy highpoly mesh is simply very hard to handle and edit.

obloquy

Hey, I was planning on using my low poly (subdivided once or twice to get a better looking mesh) then just baking my high poly with high frequency detail onto it.  I was just unsure how displacements extracted from zbrush of the same texture noise work in conjunction with the baked normal maps in SP...