Rendering high poly zbrush sculpts

Jesse Moody

So going through and revamping my folio and rendering everything so it looks the same. Did some zbrush stuff and need to get some nice renders of it.

I know I can render right inside of zbrush but would like to do it inside of 3dsmax.

I really liked how Kevin Johnstone did his and would like to have that same quality of render. Were they done in max or zbrush?

How do you guys do them?

kary

In Zbrush you do them like this: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=074301

Easiest way in max would be to setup a MR daylight system, do your test renders with a low subD level and then bring in the HP for the final render. On a 8+gb system you can bring in a surprisingly high poly count.

MoP

If the problem you're having is running out of RAM or getting slowdown in the viewport, then yeah do what Kary said - export a decimated (or lower subd) version of the mesh, do test renders with that, and when you're ready for the final, import the highest level into a hidden layer (make a new layer, hide it but leave it as the "active layer") - that way when you import the OBJ it will be placed into the hidden layer and never rendered in the viewport.
Or you could turn the viewport to Bounding Box mode and import straight away, then render.

If you're asking about render setups, X-Convict (Artem Volchik) had a nice tutorial for easy, good-looking renders - google it!

Jesse Moody

No I have a solid render setup that I'm using for everthing so it all looks like it came from the same folio.

I will have to try the hidden layer thing or go with decimation master or just lower the sub div level.

Thanks for the tips. Keep em coming.

ScoobyDoofus

Jesse: You could also try using displacement maps. Export a lower subdivision level, generate displacement maps to your highest level of subdivision. Import into max, apply meshsmooth & displacement modifiers.

Mongrelman

I found just doing auto uvs and going down about 2 or 3 levels from the top and doing a zmapper normal map gave a good result to render in maya. But with decimation master you wouldn't even need to do that.