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ArtZone Heading
First Look at the Maya Normal Map and Zbrush
Added on: Sun Aug 29 2004
Page: 1 2 3 4 6 

After the model was sculptured very similiar to the high-poly one I modelled in Maya, I put some extra details such as veins and small bump texture on it. To do these, you have to use the project master tools. Figure 9 shows the project master tool.

Figure 9

In my case, I didn't want to change color, so I only chose deformation. Once you hit "drop now", you model will stay fixed on the canvas; and you can use brushes to paint textures on the canvas. Note I turned off color, so the textures will only affect geometry deformation acting just like displacement map. When you are done, you hit projection master tool again and choose "pick up now". The textures will be projected on to your model. Then you'll be able to rotate the model, so rotate the model to different camera angle and use the projection master tool again to project textures to other parts of the model.

After a whole day in Zbrush, I got some thing illustrated in figure 10. You�ll notice that some details only appeared on one side of the body. The reason was that I hided one side when sculpturing. I thought the hidden part would change since I turned on the "X mirror" function. Unfortunately, I was wrong again. See that's how we gain experiences. But in my case here, it was OK because both halves shared the same UV layout and I only needed to use one half to export the normal map. Note if you use the whole model to export the normal map in my case, Zbrush will use the less detailed side for the map. So what I did here was that I hided the less detailed side before I exported the map.

Figure 10

I was happy with the result considering it was my first time to use Zbrush. Also what surprised me was that Zbrush could generate normal maps for you, so I didn�t have to export the model back into maya and use a much more difficult way to generate my map. The only extra thing I had to do was to flip the map generated vertically to fit the UVs in maya. If you want to use maya to generate normal map and don�t know how, check here (http://www.drone.org/tutorials/normal_maps.html.





 
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