ZBrush to Cinema4D

From ZBrush Info

by Amanda Knight

This guide covers the details of adding ZBrush to your Cinema 4D pipeline and shows the steps need for transferring your models to ZBrush and generating an ideal, compatible displacement map for Cinema 4D. To take advantage of this guide you will need basic knowledge of both programs to get started.

Cinema 4D model Setup

You will need a basic polygonal model created in Cinema 4D to start. A simple blocked out version will do, although if you are planning to animate the model, proper edge loops and line flow is a must. For the purpose of exporting to ZBrush, the model must be a fully surfaced (i.e. no holes) mesh with no generators applied such as a symmetry or hypernurbs objects. If you are modeling using symmetry, make it editable before exporting SO its seams are all sealed up properly.

Model requirements

Optimized Clean Mesh

• Your model should only consist of quads or tris, but try to avoid the latter if possible. If you must keep triangles, keep them in less visible areas of the model and avoid them in creases.
• No n-gons (more than four sides). ZBrush will convert all n-gons to a quad with triangles, as the Catmull-Clark subdivision algorithm used by ZBrush does not support arbitrary n-gons.
• If possible, quads which are significantly non-planar should be avoided as they tend to cause artifacts in the displacement.

Clean well laid out UV’s

ZBrush requires your model to have only one set of UV coordinates, so in Cinema 4D you must have a single UV tag applied to your object. To insure a clean displacement make sure there are no overlapping UV polygons. ZBrush will notify you during import if there are any non-standard polygons, which you can then see by drawing the model, entering Edit mode, and turning on the Dots display mode (found in the Transform palette).They will appear in red.

Exporting OBJ’s

Your model must be exported from Cinema 4D into a file type that ZBrush recognizes (.obj)

You can do this in one of two ways:

• With your model loaded in Cinema 4D, go to File:Export:Wavefront and name the file.
• Use the free Riptide plugin. You can download if from http://www.skinprops.com/fr_c4d.htm. Riptide allows you to customize the ordering and grouping of objects and selection sets (which can be very important when working with ZBrush).

Importing the model into ZBrush

In the ZBrush paradigm, models are“tools,” so you don’t save a document, but rather save your tool. To open the model in ZBrush, go to Tool:Import and find your .obj file. When finished with your model, you’ll export it using the Tool:Export button. ZBrush has its own model format (so it can support multiple levels of editable subdivisions); to save and load ZBrush-format model files, use Load Tool and Save As in the Tool menu. Note  : ZBrush does not automatically ask you if you want to save modified tools before it closes a document, so make sure to save your model before exiting ZBrush.

Click and drag in the center of the canvas to create an instance of the selected tool (your model). Use the Shift key to snap the model onto the X, Y, or Z axis to align the model on a specific axis. By default, models are considered to be 3D“brushes” (ZBrush started life as a uniquely powerful paint program), so to go into sculpting mode press Tool:Import (hot key‘t’). Now you can rotate around your model (just click and drag on a blank area of the canvas) and begin to sculpt.

As you work with ZBrush, it will change the positions of vertices at the lowest subdivision level, i.e. the vertices of your original model. If you need to be able to restore the lowest subdivision level vertices to their original positions, first store a morph target of the original mesh, using Tool:Morph target:Store MT . You can later restore the morph target (geometry) of your original model using Tool:Morph target:Switch , without affecting the higher-level sculpting. This is a common workflow for generating normal or displacement maps for models where the geometry of the basic mesh is already final.

Checking the model

You can double check that your UV’s have been laid out nicely with the UV check button under the texture menu. Any overlapping will show up in red

UV regions as ZBrush Polygroups

Polygroups are useful for hiding and isolating areas of your model in ZBrush. Depending on your ZBrush settings, polygroups will show up on a non-textured model as regions of either different color or different grayscales. Shift+ctrl+click on a polygroup to hide all but that one group. Shift+ctrl+click on the blank areas of the canvas to show all groups. Shift+ctrl+click and drag on the canvas to inverse the visibility of the groups.

Hiding polygroups makes it easier to edit without having other parts in the way, but it is much easier to make your selection sets in Cinema 4D, and then use the Riptide plugin’s group tag, ZBrush will automatically make polygroups based off the selection sets done in Cinema 4D. This allows use of Cinema 4D’s selection tools to separate legs from the body or the ears from the head easily. Use the Selection:Loop select to select the border edge loop and then use the Selection:Fill selection to fill the side of the loop you wish to make into a selection. Use Selection:Set Selection to create a selection set and name it appropriately, and then finally use the Riptide group tag to choose which selection sets you’d like to include in the OBJ you’re exporting into ZBrush ZBrush.

Working in ZBrush

ZBrush offers many functions, tools, and transforms for sculpting your model. Experiment with them and find out which ones will be best suited for your model. The most basic and commonly used are the Inflate , Standard , Pinch , Nudge and Smooth brushes in the Transform menu. You can have your tools work symmetrically by activating any or all of the >x< , >y< , or >z< symmetry transforms.

If you want change the material to something more matte go under the Material menu and choose or adjust a material to your preference.

To add subdivision levels go to Tool : Geometry:Divide . That subpalette also lets you adjust the subdivision level at which you work. It is best to start with the larger detail and work your way by slowly adding subdivision levels once the“rougher” details at the previous level are mostly complete.

To add the finest details such as pores or tiny wrinkles, use Projection Master , which projects the model as a flat image allowing precise detail.Choose the Deformation and Normalized settings, and press Drop Now . This allows you to use all of the depth-enable paintbrushes directly on the surface. To get the model back to its 3d state click Projection Master and then Pick Up Now .

Projection master offers many advantages at extremely high resolution levels. It is much faster then actual sculpting, allows for finer brush work without necessarily worrying about the points in the mesh, and the brushes draw more smoothly because of the speedup.The other nice feature is that it lets you use all the brushes in ZBrush, opening up the possibilities of using complex alphas, smearing and the like.

Updating and modifying UV’s

We’d recommend you double or triple check your UV’s in Cinema 4D and ZBrush before you start editing.It is possible to edit UV’s once you have already begun editing.Some apps differ from others in terms of how they export and import OBJs so this can differ from app to app so.We recommend you follow the steps very closely if you need to alter your Uvs after you have begun modeling in ZBrush.

The first thing to note is that the default Cinema 4D exporter can reorder your vertices which means you will not be able to import a new OBJ into your model in ZBrush.You will have to use the Riptide plugin to make sure this works. The key issue you’ll encounter with going back and forth between ZBrush and Cinema 4D is the point order of your model.

The second thing to note is that while it’s okay to take the final low-res model from ZBrush and use it in Cinema 4D with the generated displacement maps, and that works well, sometimes exporting from ZBrush and importing with Riptide won’t properly preserve the point order, which means the model won’t be able to go back to ZBrush anymore.

To avoid these problems, keep an original version of your model.This means copy your model into a blank file and save it by itself. If you need to modify it you’ll have a clean version to go back to.If you discover a problem with your UV’s after much sculpting in ZBrush you can go back to this original Cinema 4D model, edit the UV’s, and re-export it using Riptide.In ZBrush, make sure before importing that your model is the active tool and that its subdivision is set to the lowest level, and also make sure that you have switched your morph target to the original model state.Then simply import the updated OBJ model and you will have its updated UV’s as well.Switch back to your modified state and then increase your resolution to continue with editing.

Types of displacements maps

There are many types of displacement maps used throughout the industry.Some are there because of limitations technology used to have, some are workarounds to get past these limitations, and some are the standards most commonly used today.Cinema 4D release 9 supports many distinct types of displacement maps directly.

Cinema 4D’s supported Displacement types

Below we talk about the types of displacement maps that can be exported by ZBrush and then imported by C4D. Note that the last two map types shown in the screenshot above are not types that ZBrush generates.

8, 16, and 32 bit

Displacement maps can be 8, 16, or 32 bit.Cinema 4D supports all three, and with the new Alpha Displacement Exporter plugin ZBrush is now capable of exporting all three types as well.In general, use the largest depth you can. You can obtain details about these topics through the manual that accompanies the ZBrush Alpha Displacement Exporter (available at www.zbrush.com).

Intensity and Intensity CenteredDisplacement Maps

These are grayscale images used as maps on your model, and the intensity of a pixel determines the amount of displacement, white normally being high and black being low. A plain intensity map sets black as the surface of the model, and can displace the model surface outwards only. An intensity centered map uses a 50% gray as“no displacement”, allowing darker shades to displace in and lighter shades to displace out.This is what the standard ZBrush displacement map does. For most purposes, it’s probably best to use an intensity centered map.

Red/Green

The second type is Red/Green Displacements.This was an older method used by several studios to help get around the limited range of grayscale displacement maps (which are limited to 256 gray levels). Basically, an RGB image is used as a 16-bit displacement map (65,536 intensity levels) by using the red and green channels of the image together as a single grayscale channel. On most viewers, the image will appear colored with red and green hues, but software that understands the format will use it correctly when generating displacements

The ADE plugin

The Alpha Displacement Exporter plugin is actually split into two parts: the main part of it is found in the Alpha palette, while Multi Displacement 2 is in the Zplugin palette as shown above.MD2 is an alternate way to create displacement maps and can replace the calculation options found in the Tool>Displacement menu.In addition to allowing ZBrush to simultaneously create maps for a model with multiple UV regions, it is also the part of the ADE that supports exporting 32-bit displacement maps. More information about the use of MD2 is included in the documentation that comes with the Displacement Exporter download. (Note: If you can’t find the controls described above, you probably need to download the ADE from www.zbrush.com and install it according to the instructions that come with it.)

After you have created your displacement map using ZBrush 2’s native calculation options or using MD2, you can then use the main panel of the Alpha Displacement Exporter (shown below) to choose an appropriate export format for use in C4D

Presets

The ADE exporter looks much more imposing than it really is. It has many settings to control aspects of exported displacement maps, but you’ll need only one or two possible combinations, and these are given to you later in this document. The field below labeled Quick Code allows you to enter a supplied combination of letters, digits, and hyphens, to adjust all settings of the ADE at once, so whenever we need to specify a setting to use, we’ll just give you the quick code, and you can enter it, much like you’d enter the VCR code from a TV guide to record a particular program.

Note that you don’t have to enter a quick code every time you use the ADE, just the first time you choose the settings appropriate for C4D. These will be remembered.

Creating your own preset

Activating

The buttons at the top of the ADE screen with names like R16, Normal8, and Undefined, are all presets; each stores a particular configuration setting for the ADE, and each can be changed.

To specify your own settings, first click on the preset you wish to modify, and then turn the Status field on On . This is shown above for the R16 preset. Then, click on the quickcode field itself in the ADE panel. This brings up a dialogue for entering quickcodes. The text that comes after the last dash is the name of the preset; change this last part to change the name, without actually changing any settings.

Recommended Quick Codes

Here are some recommended Quick codes for using Cinema 4D with ZBrush. The first two are the ones we recommend the most, they offer the best detail to file size ratio. The best quality you’re going to get is a 32 bit setting, but with a larger file size.

16 bit Red/Green: DE-HCGK-DACAAA-4D_Red/Green

32 bit Greyscale: DE-JCGK-EACADA-4D_D32

16 bit Greyscale: DE-FCGK-EACADA-4D_D16

32 bit RGB: DE-LCGK-EAEAEA-4D_32

16 bit RGB: DE-HCGK-EAEAEA-4D_R16

ADE is also capable of exporting Tangent Normal maps, so here are two codes for doing that with ADE, but for more robust normal map generation check out the new ZMapper plugin available for free from www.ZBrush.com.

32 bit Tangent Normal Map: DE-LCEK-FAIAJA-4D_Normal32

16 bit Tangent Normal Map: DE-HCEK-FAIAJA-4D_Normal16

Back in Cinema 4D

Now that your map has been exported from ZBrush you are ready to apply your new displacement map in Cinema 4D. First open up your original model in Cinema 4D, if you did not store the morph target in ZBrush then you will need to import the level 1 model .objyou exported from ZBrush. To do this, go to plugin:riptide:.obj importer .

Creating the displacement Material

Apply a new material to your model. In the material manager go to Displacement , click on the arrow beside texture and select“load image…” to find and select your displacement map. Make sure you check the checkbox beside the displacement heading in the materials manager to turn displacements ON.

Sub Polygon displacement

You will notice that now when you render your model it doesn’t look at all the way it did in ZBrush. This is because the displacement is limited to only the number of polygons in your original model. To get a better effect, you must subdivide it. While HyperNURBS would allow you to subdivide the model and get the appropriate result, it would also be much slower in the editor, and consume far more memory when rendering. Instead we can use Sub Polygon Displacement, which subdivides the geometry at render time. Activate the Sub-polygon displacement checkbox in the displacement window, there is an option of how many subdivision levels you want below. Because C4D uses a slightly different subdivision calculation than ZBrush does, you can often get away with going one or even two levels less then what you had in ZBrush.Two levels lower will usually look fine and will reduce much of the render time and memory consumption.Even if it’s not quite high enough, this level works well for test renders and for the final render you can then increase to one level lower than ZBrush used.Later on, this document will cover some other tricks that you can pull to increase quality while decreasing render time.

Choosing Displacement map type

Obviously Red/Green is specifically designed for Red/Green Displacement maps, be careful not to load a regular displacement image with 3 channels into this option as both red and green will be considered as in the same direction instead of positive and negative, making a huge mess of your model.

Intensity is used for images where black is 0% and White is 100%.None of the Quick codes we provided this type of displacement so when working with ZBrush you shouldn’t need to use this mode (though it should be noted the ADE plugin is capable of exporting these kinds of maps, but there’s no real reason to.)

The most commonly used will be Intensity Centered, all the Quick codes we provided except Red/Green and the normal map codes use this mode.

Note on HDRI Gamma:

An important note regarding using 32 bit floating point images for displacement.For ease of use and maximum compatibility, ZBrush uses a Gamma level of 1.0, while Cinema 4D uses default gamma based on the Operating system used, 1.8 for Macs, and 2.2 for PCs.You must change your HDR gamma to 1.0 for the 32 bit displacements to work.A small tip, you can actually change the default in Cinema 4D to 1.0 by going to the Edit:Preferences:Common:Monitor Gamma and then changing it to 1.0.

Settings

As mentioned before, subdivisions will typically be based off of what you set your divisions to in ZBrush. Often you can get away with one less level than you used in ZBrush, but further reducing the number of subdivision levels usually produces noticeably poorer renders. There are ways to decrease this a little more and still get the right amount of detail, but we’ll look at that a little later

You will need to turn on Round Geometry and Round Contours , otherwise the subdivisions will be linear, not changing the shape of the mesh at all.This would lead to inaccurate results as ZBrush’s subdivision algorithm also smoothes the mesh, much like our Hypernurbs.These two settings allow the sub polygon displacement subdivision to do the same.

Turn off Keep edges ; this is an evil setting when working with ZBrush displacement.It tries to maintain hard edges in the Phong shading when subdividing the mesh.This will create lines at any hard edges on your low res mesh and produce undesirable results.

Best Distribution isn’t essential unless you have really hard edges, but typically does provide a more accurate result.

Strength and height

Strength and height are used to define the strength of the displacement effect.Typically we recommend you stick with 100% strength; while it can be handy for animating, but it’s usually easier to leave it and only adjust height.

For height there is no quick and simple formula to my knowledge to achieve the right height, especially since it’s dependent on the size of your model in Cinema 4D. A model that is 100M tall will use a much smaller height then the same model if it’s 1000M tall.The process is mostly a guess and test sort of thing, but there are two methods to help you get to the right result quicker.Render out an image of your model in its high res state from the side, and then compare with renders of your Cinema 4D one until it looks right.Another method is to export your ZBrush model in its high res state and bring it over to Cinema 4D.It doesn’t necessarily need to be at the absolute highest resolution, but at least something like 3 subdivisions as a minimum.When you have brought it into Cinema 4D, set it to a vibrant color like green.As you adjust your settings and try test renders, you will see how your mesh lines up.

Checking for artifacts

Sometimes there can be small artifacts from a displacement map, particularly when there are issues in your UV that went unresolved; Sometimes your UV’s are so close together that the border setting in ZBrush might cause overlaps to happen.To prevent this make sure your UV’s all have a reasonable gap around them.Typically most artifacts appear at seams, little areas that shoot out.In my personal experience these are extremely rare with even a little care take while UVing.When it does occur the best method is to simply paint over the image with a small 50% grey. You will have to use a 16 bit capable editing application like Photoshop if you need to edit this on a 16 bit image.

For 32 bit images unfortunately most paint applications aren’t capable of this.Photoshop CS2 does have 32 bit painting abilities, but its brushes can’t layer properly causing banding so be extremely careful.The ideal application would be the Production Bundle version of Cinema 4D which does offer full 32 bit image editing and painting, and allows painting directly on the model in a rendered view, so finding those artifacts and touching them up can be very simple. This bundle is not yet available to the public but we’ll update this document when it is.

Painting onto Displaced models in BP?

One of the few 3d painting programs out there, BodyPaint can be integrated directly into Cinema 4D and shares much of the same core. That means everything covered here so far also applies to BodyPaint. BodyPaint allows you to paint and edit textures directly on your model in 3D space including editing artifacts in your ZBrush displacement map, and painting other texture maps to go on your displaced mesh.The unique thing about using BodyPaint in conjunction with ZBrush over other 3D texturing Applications is its Raybrush mode, which allows you to paint directly on a raytraced render of your model in real-time.This means I can actually render my model with Sub polygon displacements using the ZBrush displacement map, and then paint onto that displaced mesh so my textures match with my displacement perfectly.

Preparing your model for painting in BodyPaint

In Cinema 4D/BodyPaint 3d you must already have your Material with the ZBrush displacement applied correctly to your model. You should have figured out all the desired settings for the displacement already. You can fix these after the texture has been painted but it may cause the texture to be less accurate. In Cinema 4D at the topmost menus go to Window:Layout:BP 3D paint . Now you are in the BodyPaint Layout. The first thing to do is to create a new texture channel for the model to allow you to paint onto it. In the bottom right menu click Texture:Texture channels:color . A manager will pop up to define some settings so be sure that the“width and height” resolution setting is the same size you used in ZBrush for your displacement. Name the channel what you wish, and hit OK .

BodyPaint allows for the painting for other channels like bump or reflection, these are painted the same way as the color channel. Both the displacement and color textures appear under the materials tab in the bottom right corner; for this example, make sure you have the color channel selected as the active painting channel at all times, and are painting on it rather then the displacement channel.

Along with 3D painting BodyPaint also offers“projection painting” which is basically the painting of a 2D image projected onto the 3D model from the current view. To turn projection painting on, click the icon of the paint brush and checker board (located in the left hand side of the interface) to enable it. Also note that enabling projection paint will create a temporary layer under the layers tab, when you apply your projection the layer is applied to your texture and the projection layer is cleared.You can also detach the projection layer by going to Tools:Detach Projection Plane .This allows you to move around and carefully align your projection plane.This is especially handy when trying to match up a decal or photo of some sort.You can reattach the projection plane using Tool:Attach Projection Plane and then apply it.

Painting in BodyPaint

Painting in BodyPaint is very similar to any standard 2D paint program in terms of tools, modes and workflow. For the sake of this guide we won’t get into the details of all these and how to use BodyPaint, but how they can be used when painting with displacements. The main tool is the standard Paint brush tool found on the left. Its settings can be changed in the attributes tab (next to color) under mode:tool . Paint on the model as you would on a 2D image.

Using Raybrush mode with displacements

A common problem you run into when painting textures with displacements isare incapable of seeing the detail and how the mesh will deform. Raybrush mode allows you to actually paint onto the raytraced version of the model, and if your displacements were done properly you can paint directly onto the displaced mesh. In Raybrush mode if you need to rotate around the model it will revert back to OpenGL and you will have to re-render. You can also Raybrush specific sections of the model using the“Raybrush render region” and select the rectangular area you wish to raytrace.

Note that every time you use Raybrush mode Cinema 4D takes time to render the displacements depending on how detailed your subdivisions are. It’s a good idea to reduce the subdivision levels in the displacement channel of the material so painting can be a little faster and easier. When you need more detail you can boost the subdivision levels back up.

Multiple Object displacements

ZBrush only allows the importing and editing of a single object at one time. Typically, though, when using this displacement workflow, there are several objects which you would like to have“fit” together like they were really connected, so how do we bring all of these objects into ZBrush, edit them all at the same time, and then export each of their Displacement maps individually? The key lies in UV tiling, and begins in Cinema 4D.

Setting up UVs

Laying out the UVs

We are going to have to connect all our objects together into one object if we want to import it into ZBrush.The problem with that though is that each object has its UV in the same area so we’ll have a big mess of overlapping UVs.UVs typically work in a 0:1 grid starting from the bottom left, with the top right being 1.Anything within the Canvas Space of the Texture view in BodyPaint is within this Grid.If a texture is set to tile, it basically loops this grid over and over to the right.Knowing that, if we move all of the UV's one tile to the right, the texture should still fit perfectly when tiling is activated in your material.This is how ZBrush is able to export multiple Textures from a single mesh, each tile is treated as a separate texture, so if each tile has a different UV, then ZBrush will export the displacement appropriate to that UV’s object.

How do we make these UV tiles?First you need to make each UV, as you normally would, inside the canvas. Try to fit as much of the UV into the Canvas as possible; the more space your UV covers, the better the final result.Once each object has its own UV properly fitting into the canvas we need to make sure each object’s UV fits into a different tile.As we said before, the UV grid goes from 0:1 so to move the entire UV over one tile, we move it a unit of 1, which will mean the next tile is no from 1:2 as seen in the figure.Make sure that each object gets its own tile, so if you’ve moved one UV over 1 unit, then the next UV will need to be moved over 2, then 3, then 4, and so on, and so on.

Once each object UV has been moved over to an empty tile, it’s important to note that you should save a copy of your file with the UV tiles before the objects are connected.This is so that when you bring your displacements back, your objects are all properly separated.

Preparing the Geometry

You’ll want to have selection sets on each model, and a Riptide Group tag to include that selection.This way each object will be its own poly group in ZBrush.You can of course have more then one selection set on each object to break them up even further if you need as well.Move all the selections you wish to have as polygroups in ZBrush over to the right side in the in the Group Tag interface. Any objects that don’t have a selection set added to a group, or don’t have a group tag at all, will all be included in one single polygroup, so make sure you do this for each object.

When exporting, make sure that the Export Groups and Face sorting Sort by Group are activated.

Detailing in ZBrush

Setting up ZBrush Polygroups

Selecting Polygroups

Using Ctrl+Shift allows you to click on a point of any polygroup and hide all other polygroups, or in this case, hide every object but the one you click on.This makes editing a lot faster and easier, but whenever you need to see how one object fits with another, you can Ctrl+Shift to actually hide individual objects allowing you to hide all but the two you need to work on and thus paint them together so they meld well.

Exporting the displacements with Multi Displacement 2 in ADE

Exporting with ADE for multiple displacements is just as easy as it is for one.The key lies in understand the UDim setting.This is the setting that defines how many tiles will be used. Leaving it at Zero runs in automatic so it will look at how many tiles you have and export the equivalent maps, but you can choose to only do one at a time if you wish. You can find further details in the documentation accompanying the Alpha Displacement Exporter.

Optimizing Speed versus Fidelity

Optimizing detail level for displacements

The biggest problem with isplacements is of course the high poly counts and thus the memory usage and pure cpu power needed to work with them.

Reducing the number of subdivisions significantly reduces the memory and cpu power needed, but can lessen the quality of the renders. To get around this there are some additional maps we can use; bumps maps, normal Maps, and cavity Maps.Using these types of maps will allow us to actually reduce the number of subdivisions, and still maintain the same visual quality, or even add more of that high fidelity detail in.

Alternative maps for high fidelity detail

Bump Maps

The first type of map is your standard bump map.This is simply a grayscale image used to define height, like an emboss effect.This has long been the standard for adding high fidelity details like scratches and wrinkles, and is still handy even with more advanced methods now available.The biggest advantage is the fact they are still simple grayscale images, in fact they are identical to what you use for displacements, so you can in fact use the same image for both displacement and bump if you wish.If you’re going to use a bump map you will want to make sure to use the DpSubPix option when generating it, creating a finer and smoother image for your bump map.

Bump maps don’t actually change the geometry of the model (that’s why they’re faster), so if you need displacements to show up in, say, silhouettes, you’ll still need the displacement map.

Normal Maps

Normal maps are a more advanced type of Bump map.We won’t get into the full details of how they work The visual quality is almost identical to displacements (and can be much better than bump maps), except that, like bump maps, normal maps can’t affect the silhouette.By using normal maps you no longer need to worry about high fidelity details being picked up by the displacements.This means you only need a subdivision high enough to get the main volume displacement and a good silhouette.

ZBrush 2 has had capabilities to generate normal maps since Version 2’s release, but the ADE can also be used to generate Tangent normal maps.To do this you need to set each channel to a specific vector, R=X, G=Y, and B=Z.For use with Cinema 4D the ideal Quickcodes are:

32 bit Tangent Normal Map: DE-LCEK-FAIAJA-4D_Normal32

16 bit Tangent Normal Map: DE-HCEK-FAIAJA-4D_Normal16

However, if you’re going to be working in any significant way with normal maps, we recommend you look at the free Pixologic ZMapper plugin for this kind of functionality.Its much faster, provides far more control, and better feedback prior to exporting the normal map.It also supports both object and tangent based normal maps so you can choose which is best for you. ZMapper is a huge and thorough plugin with a lot of settings. While the basics are quite simple it can get very deep is too much to cover here. Check out the Pixologic documentation for the ZMapper plugin for details on how to use it.

Applying bump maps and normal maps

Applying bump maps is pretty standard in Cinema 4D; you activate the bump channel and load in your bump map image (it may already be listed in the bitmaps list if you’re using it in the displacement channel too.)The strength lets you define how strong the bump illusion is.

Most users may be new to normal maps, but in 9.5 it’s actually surprisingly easy, as Cinema 4D now has its own Normal channel as well.You load in your normal map, and then you need to tell Cinema 4D which kind of normal map it is so Cinema 4D knows how to interpret the information. If you are using ADE, then it will be a Tangent normal map, Tangent normal maps are the most versatile and can allow a mesh to deform and still work, while Object can be used for objects that don’t deform.You may also need to invert certain axes depending on your ZBrush export settings, but both ADE and ZMapper can be set to export to the same as Cinema 4D’s defaults, the Quickcodes provided use these defaults.

Cavity Maps

Cavity maps are a different sort of beast in that they can really add to the effect of fine details like wrinkles and small cracks when used in conjunction with other types of maps, but aren’t really suitable for use on their own. Essentially they serve a similar purpose as ambient occlusion, but on a much smaller scale. They create darker areas in small crevices and depressions in your displaced mesh to enhance the cavity effect. The ZMapper documentation discusses how to generate cavity maps.

Applying Cavity Maps

Once you have your Cavity Map you need to apply it to your model in Cinema 4D, and no there isn’t a handy dandy Cavity channel, two out of three ain’t bad.The idea behind the cavity map is to darken the areas that would receive less light. There are a various ways to do this, such as using the layer shader to multiply this over your color map and such, but the easiest way is to simply load it into your diffusion channel.This also means that you can use the map to affect reflections, specularity, and luminance, as well as color.

As mentioned before, cavity maps don’t create a great affect on their own:

Instead you will want to use this to add to the effect of your bumps, normal maps, or displacements, it can really punch out the detail while adding no real render time hit.

Thank you for reading, if you have any questions feel free to ask me and the modeling team over at LucentDreams Animation atZPipeline_c4d@lucentdreams.net, at www.ZBrushCentral.com, or at CGtalk.com at either the ZBrush or Cinema 4D forums.

I’d like to thank:

Jaime, Aurick, Ken, and especially Ryan for his help, and the rest of the Pixologic team for the great application and training resources, Patrick Goski for his help and supplying the Masked Head Bust, Kai Pedersen and LucentDreams Animation for help in writing and asking all the right questions, all the nitpicky stuff, and Paul Babb for recommending us.