Hi, I can't get displacement maps I made in Zbrush2 to work in P5, anyone have any success in this area? if so please describe your work method. Thanks

They seem to work for me. The above pic is a low res sphere with a displacement map created in zbrush. I just do what it describes in the zbrush displacement mapping tutorial (the zscript with the telephone). Key points: *Don't try it on models with overlapping UV coords. If you want to work on Vicki or something, separate the model into one obj file for each template and then work on them separately. You won't be able to match the seems easily. *Make sure you store a morph target when you first import the model and make sure you switch back to the morph target at the end when you make the displacement map.

*Make sure you store a morph target when you first import the model and make sure you switch back to the morph target at the end when you make the displacement map. hey Ajax,can you elaborate on that? ...& also what are the best settings to use in P5?(a screenshot of the sphere materials would be great)

Here's a screenshot of the material room. What you can't see here is that I've set the minimum displacement bounds to 5 in the render settings. It probably only needs to be 2.5 to accomodate the 2.5 value you can see for displacement in the material room, but I wanted a bit of room to play so I set it to 5. You can see it's a very simple set up. The big difference between Poser and Zbrush where displacement is concerned is that Zbrush treats 50% grey as 0 displacement (black is negative displacement and white is positive) whereas Poser treats black as 0 displacement and all shades of grey are positive. To compensate for that I multiply the map by 2 and subtract 1 which means that instead of giving me displacements from 0 to 1, it gives me displacements from -1 to +1. The effect can be fairly subtle on a big model (the one shown here is 100% figure size) so to beef it up I've set the displacement in the root node to 2.5.

Now, about the zbrush bit... When you first draw your model, before you start doing any displacement, you go to the tool menu and find Morph Target, then press the storeMT button. This stores the current shape of the mesh.

....After that, you subdivide the mesh as many times as you need and start doing your displacment work.

When you're finished, you slide the subdivision level all the way back to the lowest level of subdivision (ie back to your undivided model). At this point you should notice that the basic shape of your mesh has changed. If you output a displacement map now, you'll get one that's designed to work with the new mesh, not the old one. To avoid that you go back to Morph Target in the Tool menu and press the switch button. You'll see the mesh go back to it's original state.

Now you can generate the displacement map (note: don't slide the subdivision back down to 6 or wherever, no matter how intuitive that seems. Keep it at the low res level while you generate the map).

Message edited on: 12/27/2004 23:37

that storing the MT is where I must have messed up.while I did go back to the lowest level to make the map,I didn't realise I should have stored the original mesh as an MT.I'll have a go at it now & see how it looks thanks Ajax! Stef

No worries. Remember, if you forget to store the MT, all is not lost. At the time when you would normally press the switch button, you just press the import button instead and re-import your mesh. It won't mess up any of your displacement work or anything.

Ajax, have you actually successfully done a displacement map for V3 in ZBrush. I spent about a week running through all this (used the method you described above), and found some shop-stopper issues. My 'flexing Don' gallery image was the best I could do (still has some artifacts), and I could only get it to work by importing the full mesh back from Zbrush back into P5 (ie. NOT using the MT technique). Doing a displacement map from a MT just didn't work....

That is the basic workflow I use as well. I generally solve the whole "no displacements across UV boundaries" problem with a combination of the suggestion above (split into multiple OBJ files), avoiding too much displacement around the boundaries as I morph, and then manually "blurring" the edges (in a paint app) of the textures for the areas that border other maps (such as the neck borders in the body & head maps). It means you have to remember a few more things while using ZBrush & there is a little extra work afterwards; but it can give you some very good results. There have been alot of people complaining about the whole "one mesh, one map" problem to Pixologic, so perhaps they'll be fixing that in their next release (which already has some cool new features).

Face Off, Here's a pic of default Vicki3 rendered in Poser with a Zbrush displacement map. It's done with basically the procedure I described. The difference is that I always import a fresh copy of the mesh into Zbrush just before generating the displacement map instead of switching back the MT. That's because I never remember to store the MT at the start. Try doing it that way and see what happens. Also, to allow myself more levels of subdivision to play with, I only work on part of the body. The model I imported to work on only had Vicki's torso, but the model you see in the render is of course the full Vicki. That way I can get more detail into the displacment area - as long as I don't want anything that crosses from the torso to the thighs or arms.

Interesting Ajax. Firstly, yes I tried importing the original model back in - but got the same result. Secondly, I was painting displacements on a posed and exported V3 (rather than the original obj that comes from DAZ). From what I can tell, when you export from P5, the obj is structurally different from the original V3 obj (ie. different number of vertices and poly's) - even if you don't weld vertices on the export. I suspect if I painted the displacements on the original V3 mesh (like you did) - I would have got better results. Thirdly - all the abnormalities were where body parts were joined. So I would displace a line from her hip to chest, and at the hip/abdomen and abdomen to chest boarder the displacement would not render correctly in P5 (eventhough it looked fine in ZBrush). Looks like you also have some small spotting artifacts in the image above (outside the displaced polys). Did you use Quinlors 16 bit node set-up to get around the 8-16bit issue? Would be interested if you have more luck then I did - I think there is some real potential with displacement maps (ie. make an "aging" map for V3, etc.

Actually the OBJ should be the same "structurally" when exporting from Poser, at least it has been in my experience (provided, of course, you haven't exported with welded vertices). I may be wrong, but what you describe doesn't "click" with my experiences... Mind giving me the settings you use to export the file out to OBJ & the settings used to import the thing back in? I'll use a posed Judy and see what results I get following the same procedures... If I get the same results from your methods and different ones from mine, I'll outline the differences :)

Here's another quick example. You can see it crosses the hip, abdomen and chest with no problems at the joins. Again, you can see some roughness in spots. I haven't heard of the 8-16 bit issue. Where can I read more about that?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1740708

EK - when I export V3 from Poser5 (not welding vertices), I get a different number of vertices to the original V3 obj file. Ajax - impressive. If you get around to it, could you try painting the displacements on a posed V3 figure (rather than the original V3 object file)? As for the 8-16 bit issue - see the two almost vertical lines up her belly - the one on the left of the image has small displacement artifacts. If you up the displacement amount, you'll notice it more. This is the 8-16 bit problem - fixed by quinlors node setup. See the attached link.

I tried it once but it crashed before it finished so that could be the weird regroup issue but I don't know. How do you set up the different UV things?

Ghost, ZBrush will generally crash if you try to create a displacement map for a model with overlapping uv's. I export from P5, delete all the polys belonging to the material groups that you don't want (ie. just leave all the SkinTorso, SkinLeg, etc) polys. Then import into ZBrush. You can use Wings to delete the SkinHead, eye, etc polys - although it is a little slow.

I use ZBrush 2, so this may have been fixed since 1.55 - but my ZBrush doesn't crash when importing an OBJ with overlapping UV's, but it does make texture painting & exporting displacement maps impossible. Painting results in weird streaks in the texture (as the color from a stroke on one set of UV's is applied to another), and displacement mapping just dies. The problem I have mostly is that once you delete the eyelashes, etc from a head OBJ - it becomes impossible to import geometry back into Poser as a morph target (making it absolutely necessary to restore the original shape before exporting displacement maps). When making completely different characters from a base head shape (say an elderly british gentleman from Don), this can a real pain as one needs to create the basic shape in ZBrush, export it to Wings, remove the eyelash polygons & so on, reimport into ZBursh and then paint on the displacement maps... This is a real pain in the rear

Yes TK. Same conclusion I came to. In the end it becomes a very complex and frustrating workflow. Did it once - probably never again.

I'm looking at ways in which the workflow can be changed to make it feasible (as yes, it is too complex for everyday stuff). My current experiements involve using the Compose Java utility application for exporting the head obj (without eyelashes, etc), altering & displacing in ZBrush and then bringing it back into Compose for merging back into a morph target. Currently the only problem I see with this workflow is that the eyelashes, etc will not be morphed to match the underlying face - meaning a trip through Wings to marry the two at the very least...

Dang .. I guess it is pretty useless for me then if you can't make a morph .. Ugh. Thanks

You CAN make morphs quite easily (in fact I know several artists including those at DAZ that do exactly that!). What you cannot do (at least easily) is create a morph AND a displacement map at the same time. You have to create the morph first and then create a displacment map off of that (after removng superfluous polygons). Hell a search in google for "compose zbrush full body morph" will give you a tutorial for doing just that (a full body morph using zbrush and the free compose utility).

Sorry .. I meant displacemtny mapped figure. I do morphs all the time in there but right now it has been limited to that but I wanted to try a displacement map but it doesn't seem to work so well with poser.

You can check which uvs are overlapping by going to tools-texture-uvcheck, the areas that turn red are overlapping uvs and will give you problems. I do the same thing as face-off, delete the problem areas before importing into ZBrush.

Using Wings, how would someone delete the other materials? I am just going to try again. I am trying to get rid of the eyelashes etc on he Freak head. Thanks

Also, this is with very little knowledge of Wings. I have it and did part of a basic tutorial but that is about it and that was a bit ago LOL

Can't you also use UV Mapper to delete the unwanted parts? You could also paint an alpha map on the Freak template to mask out the teeth, eyelashes, etc., load that in ZBrush and select masking, alpha intensity, then go to geometry, delete hidden, that will eliminate those bits, then clear the mask.

I am not sure .. I have the Mac version of UVMapper which is a stripped down version of the PC version and I am not sure what it is capable of but I know it isn't a whole lot.

To delete the parts on wings... 1) Start wings 2) Import your obj 3) Select Window->Outliner 4) Right click the material Eyelashes - choose Select 5) With your mouse over the main window, hit 6) Wait 7) Wait some more 8) Wings will delete all the polys belonging to the Eyelash material 9) Save the file and import into ZBrush (you may also want to delete some other materials).

In step 5 what is is it that you hit? I was hitting delete but it didnt seem to do anything .. Maybe that was the wait part but I never saw a shange in the mesh if there was suppossed t be one and the material never went away. Thanks

Ooooops, yes - should be the delete key. On V3 takes ages (a minute????) to delete. You can tell when it's finished deleting buy hovering your mouse over the model. If it's on poly selection mode (ie. the poly under your mouse is red), it's done.

Thanks .. I will try it again. For some reason the model I was messing with had a weird stick out in Wings that it didn't have elsewhere and then that was transfered to the mesh upon export.

Eterl_Knight - I've been looking to try out that Compose utility - but can't find it in the Free Stuff. Do you know where I can find it?

Attached Link: http://www.tir.com/~johnwind/Compose11.zip

Yeah, a quick search on Google turned up this (valid) address. I got the link through another tutorial from awhile back. Another thing that might interest you is a thread over at CGTalk that allows you to import models with multiple UV Sets. It would take a little fiddling in UVMapper or similar as it requires the UV's to be in blocks outside the usual 0-1 range, but it would allow you to paint displacements from the head down through the neck onto the body with (relatively) seamless transitions across the UV/texture borders. http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=200732

Ah, thank you. I'm still an "AltaVista"er, should get onto Google. Will check out that cgtalk thread.

No hassles - I moved from Altavista to Google a couple of years back - never looked back grin I dunno how useful the whole CGTalk thread is, but given the overall gist of the thing (and the results!) I'm willing to give it a shot tonight and see how well it works out.

Oh wow - I just ran Compose. It did in 3 mins what takes 20mins in Wings!!!!! Fantastic.

Thanks for the bit depth thread, face off. I haven't had a chance to do any more in Zbrush and likely won't get one for a while, sorry. On deleting bits of mesh - it's dead easy to do in UV mapper and also very fast. You just select the faces you want to delete and press the delete button on your keyboard. Another approach to the overlapping UV problem is to go into UV mapper and re-scale each map to fill one quareter of UV space. You could put the body in u=0 to 0.5, v=0 to 0.5, the head in u=0.5 to 1, v = 0 to 0.5 etc. It's quite easy to do that precisely in UV mapper (you probably need to the commercial version for that one though). Then when you've done your image map you can just cut it up into four parts and use each one for the body part it corresponds to. There's a bit of mucking about in that, but you only have to do the re-map once and then you can save your remapped vicki as a ZBrush tool for next time.

Ah Ajax - the delete key again. Yep - that might be the even easier way to do it. I've looking into the remapping uv's option and didn't like it much...can't give you a reason why, but would prefer to not go down that path. I've got a pretty good workflow now for exporting a morphed and posed mesh to from Poser to Compose to ZBrush and back to Poser. Then I apply the SkinBody material to the imported prop, and apply a mat pose to make all the body material transparent. Work quite well.

My reason for not going down the remap path is the loss of resolution. I want detail and you can't get it that way. It's the only way I can think of to cross boundaries between maps easily though. I guess a lot depends on how much detail you need in the output.