Vector Displacement Map from ZBrush to Maya Setup

hey Hing F flip normals here and in today's tutorial we are going to be covering how to extract a vector displac map from cush and how to apply that to our scene in Maya using Arnold a vector displac map is a different kind of displac map you can see up here you have just normal Diss and we have Vector diss Vector displac Maps generally perform better results with a normal display map it can only go up and down but with a vector display map it can also go to the side so this can generate shapes that normal displac Maps simply can't do so for instance if you have a horn that does not just go straight up and down there's a little bit of a curve to it like so this is going to be more accurate for sure in general of course I highly recommend that your topology supports all the shape so this doesn't really happen but you know this kind of stuff can happen in general Vector displac maps are just more accurate the con of vector displac Maps is that they are software specific so this video here for instance is not going to work for V or BL blender or any other render engine this is specific to Arnold for Maya it might work with other Arnold versions and other software but it's specific to Arnold and since it's using all the channels red green and blue it's also not easy to use this directly in texturing for instance often you would take the displac map and you would put it into painter and you use that as a mask for different things you can't really do that here so in that case you you would have to still just extract a regular displac map also the setup is a little bit more complicated and you have to know a few values but honestly once you know the setup it's it's very straightforward it's not harder to set up once you know how to use it so I highly recommend sticking with Vector displac Maps also if you prefer this tutorial here as a written tutorial we have this on blog. flips.com and this covers every single step in writing which of course is very handy if you want to revisit this in the future and before we get into the video be sure to check out flips.com our Cur and Marketplace for amazing tutorials and really high quality assets like for instance this I kit here that allows you to Simply drag and drop the eyes into any character and it's going to look absolutely gorgeous right away we're very proud of this kit and we use it for our own characters as well so back in zbrush before we extract a vector display M again into the settings you just have to be sure that your model has two things the first being that it has subdivision levels in this case we have six subdivision levels and that your model also has UVS it need subdivision levels because in C brush the way you extract displac Maps is different between one level and the other so for instance if you go between one and six that would have a lot of details and if you go between like three and six that would only be the difference between these two and your model also needs UVS because the vector display maps are texture maps and they need to go into well a texture map so once you have that then you just have to be sure that all layers have been deleted in this case we don't have any layers we can also just delete any more targets and such just to be on the safe side if you do have layers just go to highest sub level and either delete it or just hit bake and then we go to a new place you might not have been before which is under preferences and let's just dock this over and then we have to go to Import and Export and here you see two settings there's no reason why you would have been messing around with this before if you haven't done Vector display maps for Arnold you have to change the first one to 47 and the second one to 25 if you choose different numbers for these ones is not going to work and this is the specific part of this tutorial which means that you get a different map which is not going to work in other software if you're using another software and you're following this one you will have to figure out what these numbers are for your specific render engine so once you've set this to 47 and 25 again for Arnold for Maya then you go over to C plugin which you can find over here and just dock this over here then we have Vector display map and there aren't really that many settings we have to be concerned with the first one is do you want sub tools or not and in this case we don't really have sub tools so that doesn't really matter then if you do have sub tools merge Maps is fantastic because this means if you have models that are in separate sub tools but they're sharing a udm then they are going to be merged into one this doesn't work with exrs just as heads up so you have to export this out as a tiff and we can just disable this then Map size pretty obvious what that is in general I prefer to keep this as high as possible and but in this case we're just going to set this to 2K map border this is how much of a bleed is there at around the Border you generally want to set this to as high as possible flip V I'm sure this is definitely enabled because C is weird and all maps need to be F vertically you re UV you can do this as well this is just going to smooth UVS and Export options then we go to file names this has to be set to udm under the UV tile here if you have udims my model here has a few udims I think that's four udims so this has to be set to udims otherwise it's not going to work because the other conventions here are like old school Legacy conventions which might work with modbox so set this un then we go to Vector display map and then you just be sure that all these settings here are enabled and then which subdivision level should you be going from if you are exporting the subdivision level one the mesh from this level then you need to set this to one if you're exporting from level two you need to set this to two pretty self-explanatory in that regard you just have to be sure that these are exactly the same when you are exporting your map and exporting your mesh so that's it for exporting out the maps now once you are ready with this and you are sure that you don't have any layers or anything like that you just go to create all maps then you hit save in the correct location and this is going to take probably a few minutes so here we are now we just have to export out our mesh as well we go from Tool and then export and then we are just going to be exporting this out and now in Maya we just have to import our mesh the one we just export out now just drag and drop this in and here we go we have our nice little mesh you can also see that we have the three Maps here as well you can also rename these ones as well we are not going to do that now but uh you can see that the convention here is quite messy so you probably do have to name them the convention I will be using will be V disp underscore and then the udm number in Maya there are two steps we have to take to make our Vector displac Maps work the first one is we have to apply the vector displac map to our mesh itself the second one is that we have to set the model to be smooth at render time so we are going to be starting off with just setting up the um Vector displac map itself also we're just going to go into a camera I've already set this up so this has a bit of a light to it and uh such so this is a nice little scene now we are going to be creating a new material we we are just going to be using the standard surface and we can just call this Carm and that's okay and then we are going to bring up the hypershade so we have the hypers shade here and we are going to go under the standard surface Shader group this is just a Shader group that every material has under displacement mat we are going to click on this one then we're going to hit file and this is going to set up a displacement Shader for us now this is almost correct this is set up to be using a standard displacement we want to Vector displacement map so we just go under displacement then we change the image name and we find the file we have and here you can see that this is weird right compared to normal display map this has red green and blue and this is because it's using all those channels to get a lot of extra data open this up and just change the color space to Raw this is under utility here and raw and then change UV tiling mode to Mari and now you can see this finds this beautifully and then we have to go under the hypers shade here and just change the out color to Vector displacement map and we can just delete the other connection and then under displacement Shader itself we set the vector space to tangent and if we TR to render now you're going to see that the displac map is actually applying correctly but it's is faceted which means that it's pushing and pulling the polygons in and out as it should but it's very low rest and that's because we've only done with step one out of two we've only apply the displac map with the correct settings in order for this to actually show up properly we have to obviously give this a lot more resolution so that's step two and we can do this very easily by selecting our model and then we have our attribute editor go here under the attribute editor the first node here is always a transform node this means that this is where is the shape in space and the second one is a shape node this describes how the shape is actually being rendered and under here we have Arnold then under Arnold we have a little tab called subdivision and we set the type to cat Clark this means that it's going to be using catl Clark which is a pretty standard algorithm for subdivisions and then we can just change this to the same amount of subdivisions that we had in seers in an ideal world but in a practical world where we have limited computation space or computation times then we can just set this to you know we can try out what works here something like three or four is probably going to be fine and then under displacement attributes we can enable auto bump which is going to put the extra info that we we aren't actually putting into the model itself we just put this into the bump and that's really it this is the only thing you have to change for now so now we are just going to be doing another render and now you should see that this here is going to be nice and smooth and you can see here because of my lace is sculpting I still have brush Strokes in this model and you can see that this works beautifully right now so this is how we set up a vector display map in C brush but I don't trust display maps I'm paranoid like crazy about display maps because there there's so many things that can go wrong with it so to be sure that this is actually working what we are going to be doing we are just going to be storing this render and then we are going to be exporting out a decimated version of this model so we can compare this to the render because otherwise we we don't really know what this looks like cuz this looks different than what we had in sewor but of course it looks different because we have a different focal length we have different lights we have different um material on it so of course it's going to look different so it can be very hard to see if it works or not CU one of the issues with display maps is that you often lose a lot of your details going from C brush to Maya so we just want to be sure that we haven't lost any of that so let's jump into C brush and again we just have to be sure that we don't have any layers or anything like that and that you also saved your model before because I'm going to decimate this guy now we don't have to bring in the whole in this case this is going to be like the 29 million poly version because that's going to be pretty insane even in terms of like making the um decimated version because this just going to be way too heavy so we are instead going to just go one sub level down just shift d and now it is going to be seven then I'm just going to be deleting higher and deleting lower and then we are going to be going on over to C plugin as well again is from here and then we go under the master right here you can also just hit the shift key this is a little cool tip to open up multiple as well just a little bonus tip for you and then here we can set the um custom points here just set this to like a th here you could of course just do another decimation here but this is going to give us a million polygons which is going to be fine and then we just hit custom we don't need UVS or anything for this because this is purely a decimated model so we don't want any ISS we don't want anything else with this we don't want to apply the texture map we just want to test that this is going to work and there we go this took around 3 minutes or so and this is now at almost a million also a little tip as well just delete your caches once in a while because this is going to fill up real fast when you start to do a lot of decimation then we go to Tool export same thing as before then we go to Tool and Export and now in Mya we are just going to be dragging in this model here this is a little tip as well you can just drag from the Windows Explorer keeping this nice and simple and here we have our decimated version on top then we are just going to be assigning the same material that we just did this is the character mat we just want to be sure that we kill the displac map on this because that's going to not really work because that's going to apply displacement twice we don't have UVS but just to be sure so we just going be hiding the original one here and then we are just got to make sure that this one here is here these are not actually going to look exactly the same but this one here is going to look a little bit better actually because of the decimation we're going to be losing a little bit in it but that's you know that's a good thing that shows that this is this is accurate so then we can just hit start and this is going to look very similar now to what we had before but yeah you are going to be seeing some issues in it like some of the creases are not going to be as dark but in general this should look one to one so cool now it's done rendering let's do a uh comparison between these two and let's just go between these two so you can see there's a tiny bit of difference here this is in the roughness that you're seeing here meaning that it looks like one is more broken up than the other this is purely a decimation issue because here it's more accurate this is the first one which has all the nice pores sculpted and since I'm doing the pores on this guy here in the shape itself this is going to just cause issues so this is working if this wasn't working you would see very very different results you can see some issues here but again this is just a decimation to verify this that this is indeed just the um the summation we can just go go into C brush and then we can just start to see some of these areas here that this here is just going to be a little bit more broken up you can see here that this here is just quite decimated where if we undo this you can see that this is uh looking a little bit softer and such so this is how we set up a vector displac map from C brush to Arnold so yeah that's it I hope this was helpful for you keep in mind that um we also have this tutorial here as a written article and that we have tons of amazing products on flipn normal.com so see you guys in the next one

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 5,620

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: A3HUb3HUb9c

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023