Zbrush doesn't have normals. There are no normals on a zbrush model. If you look at a low resolution model in zbrush's viewport you'll see that it's faceted.
Zbrush geometry *visibly* has no vertex normals. And there's no way to edit the face normals in zbrush. So for the purpose of normal map baking a zbrush model isn't useful unless it's the hipoly model. This means that using the baker inside zbrush - which uses the lowpoly from zbrush - isn't a good idea at all. I'm trying…
You can render a polygon without normals. You just don't do a backface calculation. Or any kind of shading. But the precise answer would be that zbrush doesn't save normals as part of a file. It calculates them when it goes to draw a model. A lot of the things that apply to normal 3d programs don't apply in zbrush.
Hey there. Now I'm getting my first experience with character creating. I've made a sculpt of character's head. I tried bake normals and I found out a few problems. Why artifacts appear? What's wrong?
Thanks for your help. Yeah, zbrush is very bad software for tex baking. I've moved my mesh to Cinema 4D, then I've baked normals and got a correct result. Thanks. Now I'll try to improve my sculpt.
Of course ZB has normals. A vertex/face can't exist without normals. What Zbrush doesn't have is smooth shading - well it actually has a hack to force a quasi-smooth shading mode - at least not in the sense that tradtional DCC has.
Firstly, Zbrush is one of the last options I'd use to bake. There are so many other quality options available so why would you want to? Secondly, I understand your excitement to run through the pipeline, but if you're serious about creating character sculpts in Zbrush then you have a long, long way to go until that head is…
This thread certainly got a bit strange. Why are we talking about custom-written render engines and invisible meshes that have no normals? For all intents and purposes Zbrush geometry does have normals. It doesn't matter what happens if a renderer renders a hidden mesh. What we're concerned about is normal map baking. And…
@sprunghunt fair enough, mate. I'm all in favour of trying to help beginners understand the why. I'm not a tech artist or a programmer so I didn't know the theory of what was behind the reason Zbrush behaves this way. I do know that the canvas document shading was to enable us to work on very high res meshes back when ZB…