How to create a primary normal(or displacement)map and a secondary tertiary map?

Shaders
1

Not sure where to post this, but it’s related to shaders so I’m trying here.

I’m creating a character and I’ve been thinking about how to have one normal map for the primary shapes and then a tertiary normal map for skin details such as pores and finer wrinkles.
The primary shapes normal map should be baked for each character whereas the tertiary is added as an overlay in the shader. That way I don’t have to do heavy sculpting and projecting in ZBrush and bake it down explicitly for each character.
Only the primary shapes are baked down and and then combined with skin details in the shader.

The idea is that I might settle with normal maps, but this process could also be used for displacement if I want to go for higher quality.
So I could have the primary shapes as displacement and then the finer details as a normal map, basically the same map as for my lowpoly, only 16K instead of 4k or 8K, instead of going displacement full on. Maybe there’s no advantages of using normal maps if I’m going for pre-rendered images? Just use displacement maps?

Either way. I’m looking to split up the primary shapes from the tertiary shapes and was hoping someone have some really great tips.

What I’ve done is to smooth out the highest subdiv in Zbrush and created a normal map from lowest to highest to get a smooth map, following the characters body shapes, muscles.
Then I did a normal map from level 3 to level 6 with all the sharp details to get the finer tertiary shapes.

But I’m thinking. Could I bake out a normal map of the full range, level 1 to level 6 and subtract the primary normal map from this full range one to like “flatten out” out so there are no larger shapes in the map, only the tertiary details?

For a workflow point of view I think it would make more sense to work with displacement maps and have Mari as a step in the pipeline. You’d bring in the maps and decide what to use them as. Will they be painted further, or just baked out to normal maps. This of course depends whether I would get the same results from baking Displacement to normals in Mari as I would in XNormal.

What’s your guys opinions and thoughts?

3

This sounds like a process question about texture baking, really. If I understand correctly, you’re trying to take a high-res sculpt and bake it down to 2 textures, one which contains only larger details, and one which contains fine details but without any of the larger forms.

Honestly this sounds like a bit of a convoluted way to go about it if you ask me. I’m not sure there’s a nice, easy answer. Like photoshopping strangers out of vacation photos, it’s possible, but it would’ve been way easier if they were never in the photo.

If it were me I would either…

  1. Export the high detail version and try to manipulate it in photoshop to remove the larger details and get the generic “tertiary” map that you want, or…
  2. Start over with a flat plane and sculpt only fine / “tertiary” details onto it, then export your “tertiary” map using that geometry.

Best of luck.

4

Hey thanks for your reply!
So the way I’m thinking is that I could then sculpt a new character and only bake the details for the large shapes, then always have a high detail pore and skin map to layer on top. But maybe it’s a weird and unecessary way to go?

My reasoning is to use this so that I could make corrective shapes and bake normal maps to go with it. It would bake faster if I didn’t have to go up to the max details with all the skin detailing. However I might be overthinking this. :slight_smile: