There is a bit of a down side to this however, with some matcaps its almost impossible to recreate an accurate representation of the original zbrush matcap with out a lot of tweaking of other material settings with in the external application. Thanks I always had this in the back of my head, I just couldnt seem to understand it until directx method of max is similar to the ‘normal’ method of blender? It looks CG ADDICT I think the above metheds are great aswell this is just my 2 cents. It helps to create a border of above 4 on your UV to avoid seams.

You can even use the nomalRGBMat material and use it as a Normal map which is handy because you can adjust the height by adjusting the displacement map height. The good thing here is you just change matcap and BPR render it again and again, very quickly once its set up.

Click on ‘Img’ under ‘Create maps’ to save your new map.

This will render it to the document size and antialiasing applied for good quality. Press ‘BPR’ with everything off (shadows, AO, etc) Select ‘Create maps’ under render-BPR menu now choose any matcap (center the single light if using standard materials) If you need a flipped map use ‘Deformation’ and ‘mirror’ on Y and x axis(this will flip the tool if using it for 3ds max Press ‘F’ on keyboard to frame the tool to the document (This fits it to the screen so its the same as your UV map)

‘flatten’ in UV master, turn on (‘Disp on’) displacement map (If flatten doesnt work, ‘Copy UV’ from original cloned tool) Clone tool and delete all high subdivisions leaving only the lowest (the one you made the unwrap with) Set the document size to 2048 x 2048 (if this is your UV size), Once set up just change matcap and render This is similar to original post just no ZAPP link or 2d tool.

Blender matcap download