Quick and Dirty ZBrush Texture Bake for Second Life Sculpties
by Sylvia Trilling of Flying Tribe
I use ZBrush 2 as I am on the Mac. This is what I figured out after struggling with the ZBrush map functions which I could not get to work and found only plug-ins for the PC. If anyone has a better way, feel free to let me know.
Page 1: ZBrush Projection Master
Here is a tool I sculpted from Hypatia Callisto's sphere.
After saving your tool and exporting it to an object file, go to the Geometry pallet and hit divide 2 - 4 times until you have a nice smooth surface.
Select a material. The baking process will make the material appear darker, so edit the material and increase ambient lighting. Make the material as light as possible without messing up the specular highlights. Adjust the position of your model so the highlights land where you want to get the best appearance.
Select a texture size and creat a new texture. I like to do this at 1024x1024. You may want to reduce the final before uploading to Second Life. Click the Projection Master button and select Colors, Shaded and Material. Hit drop. Then immediately hit pickup. You have just "painted" your material with lighting onto the texture, but only where it is visible to your front view.
Rotate your model. Don't worry about the rough edges and bald spots, we will be fixing these in Photoshop.
Continue to rotate your tool until you see the other "unpainted" back side. We will be repeating the Projection Master step. Here you can change the light source from left (default) to right to get a more consistant light source for the overall bake. Go ahead and repeat the Projection Master step. Export your texture and open it in photoshop. If you wish to use Projection Master to apply color to your model, I suggest that you do that as an entirely separate step with a different texture export and then combine your layers in Photoshop.
