ZBrushCentral

BAKING MATERIAL IN ZBRUSH, tutorial

For those who always wanted to bake zbrush materials, I found a simple and efficient way, without using any pluggin.

ZBthb.jpg

Here’s the link :

http://sebleg.free.fr/tutorials/zbaking.html

Happy baking!

Wow, thats pretty Cool, Thanks!!

Patton

i agree, its pretty cool seb.
smart way to bake materials:+1: :+1:

Nice that’ll come in handy. Thanks Seb :+1:

You just transform a material to a texture… (nothing new).
You can’t export zbrush materials.

smart and easy!
Andreseloy

Very Cool. Thanks!

Does anyone know how you would bake multiple materials in a single UV layout?

After you have your UVs set, color code your model where different materials will occur. Next, render this out to form your template map. Then create baked maps of the model with each material applied to the whole thing (to save time). What you now have is a series of maps for your model in all the different materials it contains. Then in a program like Photoshop use the template map to select each region. Then all you do is cut and paste from each material map, until you have your composite. Finally, save as a single layered map. The end result is a single map with all the baked materials included. I’m new to ZBrush. So, there may be a simpler way that I’m unaware of.

Thanks. This is really nice.

Great Tutorial! Thanks a million!

Hi Sebcesoir, great tutorial and your works are really amazing!:wink:

wow i can’t believe that button was there!!!

Ok seriously now after all this time bakeing by hand I really want to scream.

If you have different materials assigned to your model texture (by using the materials option in Projection Master) then when you Export the texture you will be given the option to include the material info as a separate channel. What this does is add a grayscale image to the alpha channel of the photoshop file. Open it up in PS and in all likelihood the alpha channel will look almost black. This is because the different materials are represented as shades of grey from RGB 1,1,1 to 75,75,75. Adjust the levels and you should be able to see the different material areas easily. If you duplicate the channel before adjusting the levels you can select an area on the adjusted channel and then get the RGB value from the non-adjusted channel - this value gives you the material ‘slot’ in ZBrush (so, with the default materials 1 would represent the FastShader).

i am so sorry that i couldn’t watch such a good video. the link is unreachable for me. can somebody upload it to another place, like oxyshare.com or so?

thx a lot.

Sebcesoir’s tutorial was always a web page, not a video.

what a pity. then what should i do to get that tutorial?

I don’t know. The link works just fine for me. It might be the browser you’re using.

That’s a very nice tutorial. The technique of lighting the displaced canvas was demonstrated to me before I created the material baker script, but there’s slight difference in how the lighting is baked using the displaced crop and fill method.

Basically the difference is like the difference between lighting an engraving on a flat wall with only areas that are only slightly raised out or carved in rather than a full 3d sculpture you can view at any angle. The back of the head, for instance, will receive the same even lighting as the front.

I think for skilled artists working with realtime engines, this even lighting technique will be better since they can paint in the highlights and shadows they want, and lately the lighting techniques and hardware has advanced to such an extent that trying to include highlights and shadows in the texture image to make things pop out more has been less of a necessity.

For me, as a not so skilled artist, I always wanted to paint my model with uneven lighting and multiple lights lighting different parts to get some lighting variation though, so baking the model as like a 3d sculpture rather than an engraving on the wall was something I found necessary.

There’s another use for 3d baking however, and that is to leverage ZBrush’s rendering and shading capabilities in another 3d package. You can do a 3d baking of a scene complete with global illumination, for instance, to one or more texture images, export the 3d objects complete with the baked texture images to another 3d package, and then just do a matte render of those objects in the other 3d package with the baked texture images and you’d basically get the same rendered result that ZBrush provides, and this should render in seconds for each frame because it doesn’t have to do any radiosity or lighting of any sort. This is commonly done in archviz fly-throughs and level designs for games.

This is one of the main uses for real 3d baking with uneven lighting, but the material baker is a very clumsy way of emulating it using multiple front projections rather than real 3d baking. Ultimately my hope with the script was for it to become semi-popular, but for its unavoidable shortcomings to create greater demand for real application support to allow real 3d baking.

Very helpful.
Both your version and Customs script… Thanks.