In this tutorial, Nexttut shows us a quick overview of the workflow between Zbrush & Arnold in exporting the displacement map, to achieve amazing rendering in Maya.
How to export Displacement map from Zbrush?
This new tutorial from Nexttut shows us how to use Zbrush‘s multimap export to create displacement maps that you can use within Maya using Arnold.
The workflow is pretty straightforward, but there are a few things to remember when working in ZBrush.
This tutorial is focused on the workflow in ZBrush, Maya, and Arnold, the same principle can be applied to export displacement maps from ZBrush to other programs like Cinema 4D, Blender, going to manage the exported map in Redshift or Cycles and EEVEE engine.
Zbrush Arnold Displacement tutorial
What is Displacement Map?
The displacement mapping uses the same principle of the bump mapping (roughness), with the difference that the displacement intervenes directly on the geometry of the model, modifying it.
This type of displacement, on the other hand, to obtain good results, requires a high level of mesh tesselation, therefore it has the disadvantage of generating very heavy 3D models and scenes, difficult to manage. We recommend managing the mesh by balancing the subdivision of the mesh according to the detail effect you want to obtain.