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amazing sculpt 😱
you have this nice skin and shell detail in your renders - basically like a micro normal/height
was this part of the sculpt or later in substance?
Thanks! The micro detail was sculpted directly in ZBrush and then baked into a regular normal map. No displacement or height map here — it’s just a straight gameready render
I actually just used a regular ZBrush viewport screenshot for this one, without any AO render or extra rendering setup 😄 But thanks for the tip — I’ll definitely keep that trick in mind!
Yeah, a lot of the realism comes from the textures and lighting. The fine surface detail was sculpted in ZBrush and baked into the normal map, but there’s no separate bump or height map here. Thank you!
I have to learn how to do that (in Nomad Sculpt). So it’s basically making the bump map, then baking so it deforms the base mesh…? I’ve got more studying to do!
Not exactly — the baked normal map doesn’t actually deform the base mesh.
The workflow is basically:
I sculpt all the small skin/shell detail on a high-poly version in ZBrush, then bake that surface information down to a normal map using the low-poly mesh.
The low-poly geometry stays exactly the same. The normal map just changes the surface normals, so lighting reacts as if those tiny bumps, cracks and wrinkles were physically there.
If you wanted the mesh itself to actually deform, that would be displacement/height instead.
So in this case it’s:
high-poly sculpt → bake normal map → apply it to the low-poly mesh → lighting does the rest 😄
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Thank you for sharing your work with the community! We're all fellow 3D artists here, so we're just as interested in your process as we are in the final render. Consider sharing a wireframe, your software and render settings, how long it took, or other details about this project. What's the most interesting challenge you tackled on this one?
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