Zbrush and some normals troubleshooting

This embarrassingly simple scene has been the one I’ve been using to reintroduce myself to all of Zbrush’s tools and foibles (whether I like it or not) over the past couple of weeks. Surprisingly little of this was actually spent sculpting- most of it was spent learning that no matter how many methods you try, tutorials (written or in person) you follow, how much you bed and how many bribe cookies you bake, sometimes Zbrush just doesn’t want to let you transfer detail between meshes and/or reimport UVs. I wound up just painting the maps in Photoshop, but that’s still been fun. And now I’m just obsessively UVing ev.ery.thing. before I put it in Zbrush to start with. Although for the stuff I’m doing now it, er, doesn’t really matter, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

But this! This was cool! This was exciting! This was also embarrassingly simple.

Totally ugly normal map. It makes me sad.

Totally sweet normal map that my teacher showed me how to bake from the same exact meshes. All he wound up doing was splitting up the mesh along the hardened normals (anyone who actually knows what they’re doing is probably shaking their head and sighing right now).

Theme of the day: embarrassingly simple things that I’m botching. And/or learning. The two tend to go hand-in-hand.

Oh, P.S., if anyone has any brainwaves on how to make that knife look like it isn’t floating, please let me know. Cheers.:)