I know how tricky can be sometimes to make your Zbrush displacements look great outside Zbrush.
Maya, Softimage, Vray, Renderman or Arnold, just to name a few treat Zbrush displacements in a different way.
Let me explain to you my way to export displacement from Zbrush to Maya and Vray 2.0
- First of all, if you are working with a final asset you will have to export your displacement using your base geometry imported in Zbrush. If you did the scult from scratch in Zbrush you may want to export your lowest subdivision mesh, create a good uv mapping and re-project your sculpted detail in that mesh.
If this is the case, check this.
- Go to the lowest subdivision level.
- Turn off all your layers.
- Export as .obj
- This is the object that you are about to render. If you had imported a base mesh before, you won’t need to export it again, it would be in your 3D application already.
- Go back to the highest subdivision level.
- Turn on all your layers.
- Go down to the lowest subdivision level.
- Store a new morph target and import the previous exported .obj or your original base mesh from your 3D application.
- Your sculpted model will be substituted by the original mesh with no sculpt information.
- Click on switch morph target to activate again your sculpted mesh.
- You are ready to export the displacement maps, just check my settings below for 16 bits, 32 bits and vector displacement.
- Finally to set-up your shaders and render settings for Zbrush displacements in Maya and Vray 2.0 check my previous post about it.