ZBrush Cat - Displacement Fur

For this round of experimenting, I've attempted to sculpt fur using a stencil in ZBrush and create a displacement map to plug into Maya for rendering. 

First of all, I retopologised the cat in Maya, (which can also be done in ZBrush), and UV mapped it. (This is not intended for animation purposes hence it is not in a rig-able pose). 

It has to be UV mapped before sculpting the displacement. You can't sculpt too drasticly away from the original mesh either (like I did with the stylised fur in the previous post) because it distorts the UVs creating an undesired effect. 

The cat was not retopo'ed or UV mapped when I sculpted the stylised fur as I had not planned on using it for displacement map testing at the time.

UV Map

As this was a quick experiment I used an image from google without making it into a softened brush (falloff). (Left: texture, Right: displacement map).

Using the Flipped Normals tutorial below, I learned how to make displacement maps in ZBrush and use them with Arnold.

And here are the renders.

Next post: XGEN Fur