ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ Cavity and Ambient Occlusion Maps 337

Ambient Occlusion You can use Ambient

Occlusion maps to create attractive renders

because they emulate the effect of an Ambient

Occlusion render pass without having to calcu-

late it for each frame of animation. Figure 9.75

shows an Ambient Occlusion map. The set-

tings in the Ambient Occlusion menu will vary

between ZTools, but I have good results when I

set Occlusion Intensity to 2 (Figure 9.76).

The Occlusion Intensity slider controls

the strength and size of the dark areas in the

map. The Scan Distance slider controls the

spread between the two color values of the map,

and the Scale slider controls the overall inten-

sity of the occlusion. Note the option to create

a 16-bit OCC map. When this option is off, the

map defaults to 8 bit. When in 8-bit mode you

can alter the two colors used by the Ambient Occlusion map by clicking the Colors

button. This will cause ZBrush to use the primary and secondary colors selected in

the color swatches in the main interface.

Cavity The Cavity Map menu options (Figure 9.77) are nearly the same as those

found under the Masking menu. The cavity map generated will use the Curve setting

found under Tool → Masking. The menu allows you to alter the bit depth and colors

of the resulting map just as we saw for Ambient Occlusion. You can also click the Use

Curve All Subtools to use the Curve setting found under Tool → Masking when gener-

ating cavity maps for all the subtools of the current ZTool.

Export Mesh The plug-in gives you the option to automatically export the mesh

with the maps (Figure 9.78). In this menu you can define Subdivision Level to Export.

If you set all your maps to generate from level 2, for example, you will want to apply

them to a level 2 mesh in your rendering program. Make sure you enable Quad and

Mrg when exporting. Quad will export the mesh as quad faces and Mrg will merge

the UV points. Finally, the Load/Save Presets button allows you to store or recall all

settings from this menu. You’ll find this ability useful when working on a team where

all maps need to be extracted with consistent settings.

Multiple UV Regions and Multi Map Exporter

The Multi Map Exporter plug-in supports multiple UV regions. If the plug-in detects that
you have UVs outside 0 to 1, it will generate full-resolution maps for each UV region. This
approach, combined with HD geometry, makes it possible to generate multiple extremely
high-resolution maps of high quality from the sculpture or polypaint data in ZBrush.

Using Multi Map Exporter

The strength of this plug-in is the ability to export multiple map types with individual set-
tings from a single or multiple UV regions with a single button click. It automates many
repetitive tasks into a single, easy-to-use interface. To generate a series of maps from Multi
Map Exporter, follow these steps:

1. Load the werefolf.ztl file from the accompanying DVD.

Figure 9.75 An Ambient Occlusion

map for a character head

Figure 9.76

The Ambient

Occlusion

Map menu

Figure 9.77 The

Cavity Map

menu options

Figure 9.78

The Export

Mesh menu