50 Ornament Brush and 3D Models — VOL 14

Volume 14 adds fifty more ornament designs to the series, and it is worth saying plainly what the 16 bit in the specification buys you, because it is the number most alpha packs quietly leave out.

An 8-bit height map has 256 levels to describe the depth of a carving. Push it far enough to read as relief and the gradients break into visible terraces — the stepping you see on a displaced surface or on a normal map baked from a shallow alpha. At 16 bit there are 65,536 levels, and the same carving stays smooth however hard you drive the height slider. It is the difference between an alpha you can use at full strength and one you have to keep dialled back to hide its own artefacts.

Contents

• 50 brushes
• 4K, 4096 x 4096
• 16 bit
• SBSAR
• ZBrush brush, Blender, PSD, PNG, TIF, OBJ, MAX, JPEG preview
• 3D models in OBJ, MAX and Blender
• Highpoly

In practice that means the alphas hold up in the two places depth actually matters. In ZBrush, dragged onto a dense mesh, they cut relief you can then polish and damage by hand. In Substance Painter, in the height channel, they survive being pushed hard enough that the normal map generated from them reads at a distance instead of only in close-ups.

Where the design has a real undercut — a piece that lifts away from its background, a pierced screen, a boss with a shadow under it — no height map of any depth can hold the silhouette, and the highpoly models for the same fifty designs are in the pack for exactly those cases. Place them, or bake them down and go back to a plane.