ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ Rendering Normal Maps in Maya 331

1. Open the werewolf ZTool in ZBrush. Draw it on the canvas and
   enter Edit mode. Step down to the lowest subdivision level. Assign
   PUV tiles by selecting Tool → UV Map, set the resolution to 2048,
   and click the PUV Tiles button. For more information on UV map-
   ping, see Chapter 5.


2. Select Tool → Normal Map. In this menu turn on Tangent and
   SmoothUV. Then click the Create NormalMap button to create the
   map. When the map is completed, click Clone to move a copy of the
   map to the Texture menu.


3. From the Texture menu, flip the map in V by clicking the FlipV
   button. Export the normal map as a TIF file. You will also want to
   export level 1 as an OBJ file.
   When exporting OBJ files from ZBrush,
   under the main Tool menu, click the Export menu
   and make sure Mrg is on and Scale is set to 1.
   This will merge your UVs on export.
   These settings will maintain your object scale
   and orientation (Figure 9.56).

Maya Normal Map Setup

Now that you are familiar with the process of generat-
ing the normal map in ZBrush, we are ready to move
into Maya and render this character with a normal
map applied.

1. Open Maya. Import the OBJ file of your level 1
   mesh by choosing File → Import → ❒ and select-
   ing OBJ as the file type. Always be sure to set
   Make Multiple Objects to False (Figure 9.57).


2. Select the mesh, and under the Polygons menu,
   click Normals → Soften Edge. This will soften
   the edge normals and give the faceted model a
   smooth appearance (Figure 9.58). Right-click
   the model, and from the Marking menu, assign
   a new shader and select a Blinn (Figure 9.59).
   This creates and assigns a new Blinn shader to
   the object.


3. Press Ctrl+A to bring up the Attribute Editor.
   Select the Blinn shading node (Figure 9.60).


4. In Maya, normal maps are loaded into the bump
   channel. Click the check box next to the bump
   slot in the Blinn shader. In the Create Render
   Node window, select File (Figure 9.61) to attach
   a file node to the bump slot in the Blinn shader.
   This will open the bump 2D node shown in
   Figure 9.62. Change the Use As value to Tangent

Figure 9.56 Import export and tool

export options

Figure 9.57 Import options in Maya

Figure 9.58 Softening the edge normals to give the impres-

sion of a smoother mesh