ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

316 chapter 9 ■ Normal Maps, Displacement Maps, Maya, and Decimation Master

Newer versions of Maya have a utility built

in to do this conversion for you as files are used.

The following steps will show you how to enable

this function.

1. Open Window → Settings And Preferences →
   Preferences.


2. Select the Rendering menu and check the Use
   Optimized Textures box.


3. Click the Use Optimized Cache Textures
   Now button to convert all the assigned tex-
   ture maps to MAP format in cache to help
   the renders run faster and more efficiently
   (Figure 9.31).

Setting Up Your Scene for Displacement

Whichever map type you decide to use, follow these steps to prepare

your model to be displaced in Maya. Before we begin, you must load

two plug-ins in Maya. The OBJ exporter is a plug-in that allows ZBrush

to read the OBJ file format. The mental ray renderer is another plug-in

we’ll load at this stage so it will be available when needed.

To load these plug-ins, select Windows → Settings And

Preferences → Plug-in Manager. This opens the Plug-in Manager

window (Figure 9.32). The OBJ plug-in is called objExport.mll and

the mental ray plug-in is called Mayatomr.mll. Click the Loaded check

box next to each to load them now; you may also want to click Auto

Load so they are available every time Maya starts.

Setting Up Single 32-Bit Displacement Renders in Maya

In this section, we’ll import the level 1 mesh to Maya, set up displace-

ment shaders, and start rendering. We’ll use a single displacement map

to represent the entire character. In the next section, we’ll look at using

multiple displacement maps for a single character.

Figure 9.31 Setting the rendering preferences in Maya 2009
to convert textures to MAO format automatically

Figure 9.32 The Plug-in Manager
window

1. Import the level 1 OBJ into Maya. Make sure Make Multiple
   Objects is set to Off in the Import Options dialog box. With
   the mesh selected, press Ctrl+A to open the Attribute Editor. In the
   shape node, turn off Feature Displacement (Figure 9.33).


2. You now need to add a subdivision approximation to the mesh to
   tell mental ray how to subdivide at render time so there is enough
   geometry to support the displacement detail you need. To do this,