What is cavity mapping?
What is cavity mapping?
A cavity map is a texture that stores small-scale ambient occlusion. Also called a Crevice map. Cavity map is different from Curvature map which stores the convexity/concavity of a mesh. Cavity maps use the same baking method as ambient occlusion, except it captures smaller details.
Where is a cavity map used?
Cavity maps are essentially the blue channel of a normal map and represent dark shading in the crevices of the model. They can be useful as a multiply layer over a diffuse color map to accentuate details or as a diffuse map in Maya to help punch up the high-frequency details in a render. Figure 9.67 shows a cavity map.
What is a cavity mask?
Cavity maps are essentially a black and white mask which will give you access to crevices and high-frequency details on your model. As you will notice when we are baking the map in Mudbox, the cavity map is an Ambient Occlusion operation, but with a “sharper” and darker look into holes and recesses.
Where do you put the AO map in Arnold?
In a Physical or Arnold Standard Surface material, go to the Base Color map slot, click on it to open the Material/Map Browser, and under General, pick the Composite map.
What is thickness map?
The Thickness map from mesh is very similar to the ambient occlusion baker, but it casts rays from the surface of the mesh to the inside. This texture can be used in a Sub Surface Scattering (SSS) shader or for masking textures. The texture properties are defined as: Black values represent the thin parts of the model.
How do you Blur a cavity in ZBrush?
It might be confusing for some people, so if you want understand what these settings do, here’s a quick explanation from Zbrush Docs: Blur – The Blur slider will apply a blur to the cavity mask. By setting the slider to 100 the cavity masking will be softened.
What should the scale be in ZBrush 32 bit?
Scale: This slider affects the scale of the map; higher values will exaggerate the displacement. For 32 bit maps the value should normally be 1. Intensity: The intensity or alpha depth factor that should be used when applying 16 bit maps. This value is set when the ‘Get Scale’ button is used.
Is there a way to extract a cavity map?
It is also considered an Auxiliary Map along with the Ambient Occlusion map and Curvature Mask. There are many other ways to extract a cavity map, using renderers, Mighty Bake, etc. But for this tutorial I’ll only focus on Zbrush and Mudbox, since these are the methods I am more familiar with.
What to do if you lose your Uvs in ZBrush?
If you force the plugin to quit by pressing the ESC key you may lose your UVs! A ZBrush restart may be necessary to restore your preferences. Choose which maps you wish to create and export from top five switches. The sixth option is for exporting an OBJ file of your mesh.
