A6_Week8-Competition
Sculpting in ZBrush was required to prepare my model for texturing. I realized that the typical displacement map workflow only transfers thickness and height detail to the low-poly model in Substance Painter. This brought up a major question: How could I achieve true 3D direction changes in my model, moving beyond just a simple bump based on the normals? A form like a mushroom, for example, really highlights this problem.
I learned about the Vector Displacement Map (VDM) method in ZBrush for this purpose, which would then be transferred to Maya for rendering before texturing in Substance. However, I couldn't find good tutorials for this method, and I didn't have enough time to dedicate to trial and error. Therefore, I chose to stick with just the standard Displacement Maps for now and will research VDMs more thoroughly later.
Below are some of the learning references I collected during this competition journey, which I hope are useful.
For exporting the Displacement Map into Substance Painter:
A perfect sample of using Vector Displacement Map on a low-poly model:
Hey everyone, I present to you Burpy, a monster designed by the artist Derek Laufmann. I wanted to try out vector displacement. Every detai
The timelapse :
I found a good article covering Vector Displacement Maps. Unfortunately, since this article was created using the Mudbox and Unity pipeline, it wasn't directly useful for my work in this competition. Nonetheless, reading it was quite interesting and provided valuable insight.
Amplify Creations team shared an extensive write-up on Vector Displacement Mapping and their experiments with VDMs and Amplify Shader Editor
I faced this question: Why VDMs are not used in the real industry pipeline? And this is the answer:
And finally, in 2024, the Substance Painter's team had a livestream and announced that the VDM would be added to Substance.
Get a glimpse at some of the new features in development for the 3D texture painting software, from Substance 3D Painter 10.1 onwards.