ZBrush to Blender 2.8 Displacement Maps - Ultimate Guide 

Thanks a lot Adam! We've spent hundreds of hours in Blender over the last month which have been very focused, so we're glad it's working

Perfect timing :D We'd love to see your character

@@FlippedNormals Thanks for your awesome support guys! 🥰 It's my first complete character project and I don't know how much weird it gonna be. I am trying to retopologize everything and going to texture it with substance painter for the very first time. But feels pretty much confident; thanks for the 'Introduction to Substance Painter' course on Flipped normal marketplace. There is many digital resource website but most of them don't assure the quality of each and every product; all waste is dumped there and its so hard to find good course from there. Whereas FlippedNormals have only quality resources which makes it worth to save some money to purchase some of the courses. And also thank you sooooooo much for making these much high quality content and make it available to the community for free through youtube! We are looking forward to see more awesome content on this channel. Thank you!

They mentioned they're not doing it in the shader because vector displacement isn't supported by EEVEE

Matt Curtis yet they end up using Cycles anyway.

Can you write, explain a bit about it.I see where to export from ZB. can you write the settings and node set up?. Im totally interested in this.

create a texture node + image , go into the texture paint,(making sure that the texture editor has your newly created image) then set your brush texture to the alphas you are referring to. Your texture node can then be linked to whatever channel you need to affect (i.e. bump, disp, roughness, etc etc)

use a mix node if you have more than one layer of texture i.e. freckle layers, discoloration, so on so on

@@aiamfree Hey man! It appears youtube never notified me of your reply. So sorry for the late response and thank you a ton! Gonna try that tommorow :D (I kinda gave up on it after a while)

You're very welcome!

You bet!

@@FlippedNormals if I were you I would be waiting for 2.81 because there are some very interesting updates coming to the Poly Build tool! t.co/S462pP3cuJ Pablo Dobarro is doing an amazing job with the sculpting workflow ♥️

They take like 3 seconds, not worth it at all.

real UV mapping is coming in later updates, this is just a UV preview u can use UV Master to skip all of this and does a decent work on organic stuff.

Think I found a solution, should be accurate, theoretically. In ZBrush, set the [Multi Map Exporter] export scale to 10, It will complain that the 32-bit scale should be set to 1, ignore it. This makes the histogram range for the values 10x wider. In Blender, set the displacement range to 0.1 to compensate This avoids crushing the dynamic range of the exr if your model is small (even 32bit isn't enough for the tiny range otherwise). Apparently even 1 meter is too small for 1:1 scale in Blender.

Blender Guru has a video on this. "How to bake perfect normals in Blender" I believe it's called. Baking displacements is done the exact same way.

Most likely you will be using the Multiresolution modifier for sculpting. Use cycles render engine. Go to bake settings and click the "Bake from multiresolution" checkbox. Switch the bake type from Normals to Displacement. From here use a 2.80 bake tutorial. Note: For the time being, there isn't a basic displacement bake yet. Nor, baking textures in eevee.

Considering how rarely baking is updated in blender and that it's missing a lot of useful baking functionality i'd suggest baking somewhere else. Marmoset Toolbag is excellent and Substance Painter is decent enough for example.

U need to have a UV unwrap to make the process work :)

Hi. you mean you projected the hight res onto low res using shrinkwrap modifier instead of using displacement map??

also, why disp modifier and not plug in in the displacement map in the input on the cycle material?

@@Lostpx I wonder as well.

@@Lostpx Answer at 10:04

@@Lostpx Cause Displacement map in cycles material works only at render time, not in the viewport and so it doesn't work for Eevee which is important for istance if you want to paint on your character.

The advantage of displacement is that all of that detail is being stored separately from the mesh so that you can disable it if you want, you can easily animate the model because it's pretty low resolution, and if you do your displacement with adaptive subdivision (which isn't supported in EEVEE yet), then it will remove detail as the camera gets further away which obviously improves performance.

Unfortunately, displacement baking isn't in 2.8 yet. In fact, the whole baking system is kind of broken right now.

you could use a shrinkwrap modifier and a multiresolution modifier (to get your high poly detail on your low poly mesh) and then go to the render tab in the properties panel, find your bake settings -make sure you're using the Cycles engine -make sure multiresolution is checked(in the bake settings) -make sure the preview in your multiresolution modifier is at 0 make an image node in the shader editor and give it a new texture. make sure you have the image node and the mesh selected before you click bake

Not sure if this is 100% correct, but here's what I did that (mostly) seems to work - Export your map and base model from ZBrush, likely after reprojection to remeshed topology - In blender, plug the .exr into a displacement node (found under the vector category), and the output of that into the displacement input of the material output node. Make sure your midlevel and scale are correct - In Painter, setup your low and high poly meshes and bake your normals. - I put random normal stamps all over the mesh here to add details other than the baked normals. - Export your maps and plug them into the shader network (through a normal map node found in the vectors category). Both the displacement node and Principled BSDF have a normal input and I'm not 100% sure which is correct, however the input on the displacement node seems to give weak normals so I think it's the other one but I'm not sure ( I checked the Blender docs and the description for that input is just blank *facepalm*). It makes the surface jiggle a little if you toggle between just the displacement and the displacement + normals, so I'm not sure if this is the right way to do it, but the extra high frequency details from the normal map get overlayed on top of the displaced geometry without over-exaggerating the low-mid frequency details present in both maps. If anyone knows more about this please share.

If you create a sculpture in a program like zbrush and you want to use it in a movie or render it in high quality you would have to export it into blender. But blender can't import models that are millions of polygons in size. So you have to import a low res version of the sculpture and subdivide it inside of blender until it's as high res as the zbrush sculpture. But if you just subdivide the low res model it's going to become a high res smoothed out version of the low res model. So you have to displace the surface using a displacement map. Then you will end up with the sculpture you made in zbrush in blender, you can then texture the low res model or animate it. To achieve very high res and realistic looking models.

@@DanIel-fl1vc thanks for the time you took to help me out, that was very helpful 👌

@@DanIel-fl1vc but i am still getting probs because i am only getting good details at sub 6 but my blender can't able to handle it what to do?😔pores on my sculpt dont get good view on sub 5

It already supports udim in version 2.81

@@Solomon_Amoasi972 Great, now how do you create and use them in blender is there documentation on that?

No we're not. I really don't see that happening anytime soon. You have to think about, why? From a production point of view, you would have to change your entire pipeline. Re-write all your plugins, retrain all staff to use blender. And ultimately you have a software that's still lacking basic features. Don't get me wrong, blender has so many cool things to offer, and the openness of it makes it really accessible.but ultimately, no.

Yup!

You can model and retopologize in blender but i don't think it will be able to do the maps and projection. P.S just pirate zbrush.

It's not there yet, and I heard in today's Blender Today livestream that it seems to have been pushed into 2.82.

Here you go: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2r0KsLYr3wA.html

If you're referring to the sculpt overall, that looks like the one they made a couple videos back in Blender. They may have finished it in ZBrush, or maybe retopologised it, I'm not sure.

@@charltonrodda Just sculpts in general. I saw a sculpt that they did in Blender recently which looked to be of ZBrush quality, certainly better than the model used here.

This sculpt was started in Blender and finished in Zbrush. Zbrush handles higher polycounts way better than traditional 3D apps.

very far but it's coming full force, maybe more few years or so to catch up that if Autodesk stays still and do nothing.

Once Blender gets full integrated popular renderers it will sky rocket the way to the top...

Vray redshift arnold

@@henrique-3d Redshift is comming bro vray they stop the support for 2.8 and arnold they said no way

@@thiogarces I would be 100% satisfied with only redshift then!

It doesnt work with Eevee though

@@FlippedNormals It looked you were using cycles in there

They're coming to 2.81. I believe November will be the release date for 2.81, but I'm not entirely sure yet.

Thanks for the tutorial guys, this looks way simpler than importing into maya. I'll be waiting for that UDIM support.

@@kassiag7579 I'll be downloading that as soon as it comes out

It actually depends on the pipeline. Some studios do use it from time to time. When you're working for yourself, you're probably better off never using it like you say.

I can confirm that this is an issue, I had all sorts of artifacts when displacing the model then I turned off smoothing and it displaces correctly.