ZBrush to Blender 2.8 displacement - a quick "How To".

so here we have a test sculpture that i've made in using dynamesh with various different sub tools and as you can see it's all part of one mesh it's quite dense and it's not suitable for rendering in a dcc app like blender maya max etc so what we're going to do is take each of these split them off into various different sub tools and then with each sub tool create subdivision levels for each of them so i've already done that over here so you can see now that we have a sub tool here one for each of the various sub tools here everything from his eyes to his head his entire head and each of them also has subdivision levels so from here you can see we have down to subdivision level one on that i've already done another tutorial on taking a high-res dynamesh object and creating subdivision levels that's the skexes tutorial which i'll link to in the description so from here we're ready to export this into blender so the way we do that is to go to our z plugin and then multi-map exporter over here i'm going to export the displacement and the mesh today you could also export ambient occlusion maps and if you had poly paint to this you could export the texture but just for the sake of this tutorial i'm going to do these two things here so export mesh is going to go and export whatever is the currently selected sub tool but we want all of our sub tools selected so i'm going to turn on sub tools here and that will export all of them we're going to choose 4k as our map size and because this is zbrush we have to flip all the maps vertically and when we go down to um actually choosing this this is the displacement here but now we have to actually say well what are the settings for that displacement so you'll see that there's a vector displacement of normal vector displacement normal these are basically the settings for whatever option that you turn on or off here so because we've turned on displacement we need to go down to the displacement map to see what are these settings for this displacement so the first thing is going to ask us is which subdivision level do we want to displace from and we could choose any we could say we wanted to take it from displacement from subdivision level three which would be here and and if we want to export a mesh with 234 thousand points that would be fine but we don't want to do that we want to export the lowest possible which is 14 000 points so i'm going to make sure that this is down to subdivision level one and export from there we do need to ignore adaptive and the sub they're basically supposed to give you better quality but tend not to and smooth uvs will leave turned on three channels 32-bit exr turn them all on ignore scale ignore intensity and we're good to go so now all we need to do is make sure that we also have export mesh turned on and that will export each of these sub tools at this subdivision level here which is here so now when i hit create all maps we just browse to a folder that we'd like to put this into hit save and zbrush will go through and export each of the meshes plus plus the displacement maps that it generates for us and we're done as you can see here the maps it's created and the meshes are here so each of these objects correspond to the sub tools that we had here and then we're also in a position and we might as well if we sort by type here we can basically just delete the material files because we don't need them um in blender so we just now have objs and corresponding dxr files for each of them you will notice that some of them for example the eyes here there's an obj but there isn't any xor and if we go to our mesh here you'll see on our eyes that's because we don't have any subdivisions on this so basically it didn't generate a map if there wasn't any subdivisions once you've got all your settings set and you know you're going to want to use them again use the load save presets and save these presets and put them in a folder where you know you're going to find them again one thing that i find useful is in the pixellogic folder where i have all of my zbrush installs is i actually create a presets folder in there and that way anytime a new version of zbrush comes in i can just i know that i won't have to go digging around for presets i know that i've stored them here in the base folder so we call this one displacement multi-map exporter blender dot zme and that will save these so the next time you just have to load them up and if you do change them for maya or for any other app and you need to get back to your blender settings so from here we're ready to go into blender so i'm going to copy this path and then we'll go into blender select our default cube which is there on our default and delete that we go to file import obj browse to the folder where we have our files and start importing them now i have to do this one by one i believe there is a way to get multiple files blender you'll notice if you select them all and holding down shift and then hit import obj will just take in the first selection so unfortunately i have to do this one by one if somebody has a script to do this in in one go please do let me know i'll be very interested in getting it so now that we have everything imported in we're ready to start going so the first thing that we're going to do is create a collection new collection and we call that geo by double clicking on it and we select all of our stuff in here except for the camera and the light and we just left click drag that in here so with with all of these selected we can press g and z and just bring that up above the ground plane here um and we're just going to select everything right click and shade smooth to smooth the normals and then from there get ready to start applying the actual displacement so before we actually apply any displacement we need to have subdivisions on it so i'm going to select everything again and press ctrl 2 that will add a new modifier to each of these objects so if we go into the modifier stack here for each of these you can see they all share the same modifier with 2 division set in the viewport 2 should be more than enough but five is what we're going to need at render time because that's the amount of subdivisions we had in zbrush so we need to take them in turn i'm going to go from the head first and we need to add in order to displace this we need to add the displacement maps that we generated in zebrush so we go down to deform and add a displaced modifier and it's going to balloon up because it hasn't actually got a texture associated with it yet so we need to say a new texture and that texture is going to use uvs so once we've done that we'll go down to the texture and specify which texture by hitting open and then browsing to the location where we saved all of this and the head is here so you can see immediately in the viewport that's looking quite good here and if we zoom in a little bit and we go back up to our stack up here you can see that if we had increased our viewport to three or four you'll see that much more detail in your viewport but this is obviously a little bit heavy on your viewport so two is more than enough to know that it's working but again at render time you're going to want this to be set to five so now we just need to go through every other object in here so say the horns for example we'll apply a displace to that as well new texture make sure it's set to uvs go down to the texture hit file open browse to the location and this is the horns so we select the horns texture and we work our way through everything here so lower gums for example has the same thing displace new uv texture open and logons and the front teeth there are some objects that didn't need displacement such as the rings here and the eyes and so they're not going to need anything here but from here if you hit render you're going to get a result i'm just going to set up some lights very quickly so we can actually see what that might look like so here we are after having applied some lights and adjusting the shaders a little bit and all i did was basically go into here and start playing around with some of these settings and they all share the same shader so the specular the subsurface all that kind of stuff but basically the final look looks something like this so as you can see the displacement has shown up nicely and this is very comparable to ours airbrush that we saw earlier on hope this helps and as usual if you have any suggestions for other tutorials please do let me know and please do consider liking and subscribing to the channel cheers bye

Channel: Sean Forsyth

Views: 11,173

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, zbrush to blender, zbrushdisplacement, zbrushblenderdisplacement, zbrushmultimapexporter, multimapexporter, blender tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender tutorial character modeling, zbrush to blender, zbrush to blender 2.8, zbrush to blender render, zbrush to blender displacement

Id: H6-xhM-dxfc

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020