



To get the best result in xNormal and making sure the rays hit a big enough mesh we should set the default mesh scale in xNormal to 16.
BAKING NORMALS IN ZBRUSH 4 SOFTWARE
Since there are a multiple of 3D software packages in the industry and being used the scale from each to the next can be very different (for an example a grid unit in Maya is different that a grid unit in 3DS Max). You low res cylinder in this example is so low that almost all the rays will miss it and giving you a very jaggy and bad bake.ĭown below is an example of how low res looks like to get a nice bake.Īdjusting the ray distance and default mesh scale in xNormal Always make sure that low res will catch all the curves and angles.Īs a practical example, if you have a high res cylinder with 64 spans, you will get a bad bake if your low res cylinder is being only 4 spans. When you're creating your low res mesh, don't go too low on geometry. Making sure that the low res geometry isn't too low and being able to catch all the rays from the bake The defaults results will give you a pretty average result in giving you a lot of double projections and bad seams or simply that the rays won't hit your geometry at all during the bake.īy following this simple rules you'll be able to get all of your detail to your low res game ready mesh, while making it appear like the high res mesh. The challenge in using xNormal is to be able to get all the detail of your high res mesh onto your low res, game ready mesh and make your lower res game usable mesh appear like the high res mesh.
BAKING NORMALS IN ZBRUSH 4 HOW TO
The program is free available and you can download it by visiting: How to use xNormal for normal map bakes and getting the best results to you low res and game ready mesh, maintaining all the detail from your high sculpt/ geometry. Especially if those other programs have tool sets that help speed that task along (just about any of them will be faster than zsphere retopology or even working with the retopology curves).XNormal is a program that is widely used in the industry for baking down your high res sculpts/ high geometry meshes out of programs like zBrush, Mudbox, etc. It requires the high and low res meshes to share the same base topology, doesn't account for vertex normals, doesn't let you specify a tangent basis for the normal map, doesn't let you use more than 1 set of UVs, doesn't let you display more than 1 texture map per model, doesn't let your UVs touch the 0:1 borders, and many more limitations.Īny one of those things alone will mean that the model will have to pass through a traditional 3d program if you care about how the final asset looks and costs, and if it's going to pass through another program anyway then there's little reason not to reptopologize it there as well. If you're aiming for a more modern game asset that uses anything more than a single color map on an unlit shader, then baking in zbrush is terrible.So even if you make a model that has good topology for deformation during animation, you still have to pass it through some other program in order to rig it and do the appropriate vertex weighting. Zbrush has some tools to pose a model, but nothing like rigging and animation tools that you'll find in actual 3d programs.UV Master doesn't exactly make the most efficient use out of a texture space, and you'll have a bad time trying to get it to straighten things up. Zbrush doesn't give you any fine control over how the UVs are laid out.Zbrush does not let you customize vertex normals, so you'll need to edit the mesh externally if you want to control it's shading / smoothing groups.That said, there are still some big issues that can easily get in the way of a Zbrush export being game-ready (and especially animation-ready): These methods are more time consuming, but you can still use them to create the exact geometry and edgeloops that you want. Zbrush does have other options that will let you be in complete control of manually retopologizing a mesh. It might do for the occasional asset here or there, but it's not a great standard to base everything around. You can get passable results from ZRemesher, but at the same time it's like getting a passing D Grade on an assignment.
