there is no point in doing this in zbrush. You can get just as good of a result in photoshop. If you paint it in zbrush first you will end up with mismatched detail between your diffuse and normal.
Update: More Zbrush detail, base color polypaint, will be taking it back to Max and fixing things and adding detail to the Diffuse and making a spec in Photoshop. Pictures: Throw words at me! Thanks.
You need to set the ambient factor to 1 as well, but u won't have the same effect since ambient is not multiplied by the diffuse. Using a vertex color or a white lightmap is the way to go :)
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/14672-post6.html That's one I did some time ago (diffuse only - no normals/spec). It's kind of old now, but it might still be helpful?
Here's a first draft of the diffuse map applied on the mainframe. Need some more tweaking, a bump & spec map and it will look quite nice And then, to give u an idea of the actual size of this "mainframe" :
Wow, that's a great interpretation of a Viva Pinata critter. You've done a magnificent job of capturing the paper-mache look of the character through the diffuse texture and alpha masking. Top-tier stuff.
While looking for reference to model the Luna Moth with I really like its natural colors so I took a shot at a more realistic texture. Single diffuse is 512 with an alpha.
thanks guys! :) neolith: i will upload later a texture sheet. katzeimsack: just cryengine2. Just as info. That guy has 9000polys and 1 diffuse, spec and normal map ( 1024*1024).