Sculpting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 85

Next, I assigned a new image to the object's
UV coordinates by selecting the object, entering
Edit mode, and, in the UV Image editor, using
Image 4 New Image to create a blank, 4096×4096
image for baking displacement. (Be sure to check
the 32-bit float option for best results when creat-
ing this image, as displacement maps with lower bit
depths can cause nasty stepping artifacts.)
Finally, I baked the displacement from my
original sculpt to the new retopologized mesh (see
Figure 6-27) by following these steps:

5. Leave the Distance parameter set to the default

of 0 .

6. Click Bake to bake your displacement map.

7. Once it is baked, save your displacement map

as an OpenEXR file from the UV Image editor
by selecting Image 4 Save as Image from the
header menu (making sure to set the file type
to EXR when saving).

Applying Displacement to the Sculpt

Once the displacement map image has been baked,
you need to create a texture that uses this image
and apply it as the input for a Displacement modifier
applied to the new mesh.

1. Select the original sculpt.

2. Use shift 4 Select the retopologized mesh and

apply a Subdivision Surface modifier to it with
a render level of 3 . This will subdivide the mesh
before calculating the displacement so that
later, when we use a Multires modifier to sub-
divide the mesh, the same displacement can be
applied.

* The procedure outlined below is somewhat inelegant

because in order to edit a texture's properties, Blender
requires you to assign it to a material, world, or brush.
To get around this, you can create a “dummy” mate-
rial to assign the displacement texture to so that you
can edit it and then assign it to the displacement mod-
ifier. (For more on how images, textures, and materials
normally work, skip to Chapters 10, 11, and 12.)

3. In the Render tab of the Properties editor, open

the Bake panel.

4. Make sure that Selected to Active is enabled

and Bake mode is set to Displacement .

Figure 6-27: Baking the displacement from the old sculpt to the new retopologized mesh. This is often easier to tweak and gives
better results than the Shrinkwrap modifier, though it takes some extra effort.