ZBrush Tip: Early Cavity and Curvature Map Baking for Consistent Edge Wear and Masking

Generate cavity and curvature maps early to drive edge wear, smart masks, and material breakup with consistency across your pipeline.

Understand the difference

• Cavity maps: Accentuate micro concavities and crevices. Great for grime, dust, and AO-like detail layering.
• Curvature maps: Capture convex vs. concave tendencies at various scales. Ideal for edge wear, highlighting, and procedural texturing in tools like Substance 3D Painter and engine shaders.

Prerequisites

• Work at the highest subdivision level for maximum fidelity.
• Ensure clean UVs before baking/export. If you need a quick unwrap, use UV Master on a clone, protect seams, then copy UVs back.
• Decide on map size early (2K, 4K, 8K) based on asset use. Higher res pays off for tight cavities.

Fast cavity map inside ZBrush (mask-to-texture workflow)

• Tool > Masking: Click Mask By Cavity. Tweak the Cavity curve and intensity to target the right scale of detail.
• Refine the mask using Blur Mask and Sharpen Mask for smoother or crisper transitions as needed.
• Polypaint > Polypaint from Mask to convert the mask into paint (white = masked by default). Invert the mask first if you need concave vs. convex emphasis.
• Tool > Texture Map > Create > New from Polypaint to convert to a texture. Export, flipping V if your target app requires it.

Curvature-like map in ZBrush (peaks-and-valleys approach)

• Tool > Masking: Use Mask By PeaksAndValleys to capture convex (peaks) and concave (valleys) tendencies.
• Optionally apply multiple passes with different strengths to build a layered result. Store each pass as a layer if you want non-destructive control.
• Convert mask to polypaint, then to texture as above. Create separate “convex-only” or “concave-only” versions by inverting masks and saving variants.

Batch it with Multi Map Exporter

• ZPlugin > Multi Map Exporter (MME): Batch export Cavity, AO, Normal, Displacement, and more in one go.
• Enable Cavity (and AO if needed), set map size, UDIM/tile support as appropriate, and choose your subdivision level.
• Use consistent naming and versions for downstream tools. Keep both 16-bit (if using height-like workflows) and 8-bit (for masks) where relevant.

Quality tips

• Scale matters: Extremely small or huge models can skew cavity results. Check Tool > Geometry > Size and use the Floor grid for reference.
• Clean inputs: Use Polish by Features sparingly before baking to reduce noisy curvature on messy surfaces.
• Edge emphasis: For sharper wear on hard-surface parts, lightly Crease edges before subdividing to keep curvature crisp.
• Blend ranges: Create multiple cavity/curvature variants (broad vs. micro detail) for layered masking in your texturing app.

Use cases and handoff

• In Substance 3D Painter, feed your cavity/curvature maps into generators for wear, dirt, and edge highlight effects.
• In engines, use curvature-driven masks to mix materials (e.g., paint-to-metal on convex edges).

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