Hello polycount, I have a question, and I can't find an answer anywhere !

So, my question is, is it possible to generate normal maps from Zbrush, without going through the painful reprojection phase ?

In my usual workflow, I do my high poly in Zbrush, retopo in Max or another program, and then use Xnormal to generate my maps (and it does a very very nice job); but, for some reason I need to do it within Zbrush.

So the method would be to import the low poly > subdivide it > use "Project All" to get the detail from the high poly back onto the subdivided retopologized mesh, and generate the normal map...

But I find the projection in Zbrush really clumsy -but maybe that just me-, I often get a lot of ugly artifacts and even after playing with the cage, the parameters, and the ZProject brush, I can't get as good results as with Xnormal (I guess even 3Ds max render to texture would work better)... My main concern is that I loose a LOT of time in the process

(One thing to mention, is that I'm working with pretty low resolution meshes for my low-polys (Something like 400 triangles)

So could I just have my high poly and low poly as separate subtools and generate a normal map?

(Sorry for the mistakes, and sorry if the question has already been asked )

for which reason do you have to do it? zbrush normalmaps are just not made for realtime display. Its starts with the lack of soft normals and ends with it not beeing synched to anything?

The reason is not really important, but I was also really curious to know if you could do normal map this way

I found this thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=96473

Pretty interesting, but I'm not sure that a final anwser, I'll keep looking, I mean, this is a pretty important feature to have, isn't it ? oO