ZBrushCentral

Frame Sequence Exporter

I created this script due to lossless movie exporting no longer being an option with 4R7’s loss of Quicktime as an export and the substandard MPEG replacement.

Thanks to a script I found by marcus_civis originally intended to export OBJ sequences I got enough of a handle on scripting in Zbrush to create this Frame Sequence Exporter macro. It exports PNG or TIF renders and TIF alpha masks since thats what I required of it, but adding extra renderpasses to the output should be trivial.

Installation:
Save to ZBrush Directory\ZStartup\Macros\Misc
Start Zbrush or Macro>Reload All Macros.

To use:
Macro>Misc>FrameSequenceExporter

You’ll want to set up your Movie Timeline Duration and FPS before running the macro! Thanks to marcus_civis again for the original source and his permission to post this derivative macro!

Been playing around with this a bit more and a problem came up in a very specific case.

Known Issue:
If a subtool is being animated with an MDD and there is no camera movement, ZBrush will behave as if Render>Renderpass>Reuse Existing Maps is active, even if it is disabled. This caused the incorrect shadow and mask maps to be applied. I’m not sure how to fix this, but a workaround is to add a tiny fraction of camera movement and keyframe it on the timeline. This is probably undesireable in most situations but in the case where the problem did turn up, it was an acceptable solution since it was for a looping animation.

If anyone has any thing to add to resolving this issue I’d love to hear it.

Also attaching a turntable version of the frame sequence renderer.

Unfortunately because I’m an artist and not a programmer, this only works if your model’s spin axis is centered along the z axis. Trying to put it along x or y just caused severe gimbal lock problems which I dont have the background to solve. Sorry about that! I’ve just created a duplicate object with merged subtools and aligned them along the proper axis if the object wasnt constructed along the correct axis originally. I know, sloppy but it works so far. :stuck_out_tongue:

For my own needs it outputs a 360 rotation into 60 frames, simply edit the following line and value to change it if needed.

[VarSet,frames,60]

Thank you Teck Weng for this very useful script. Should come in very useful as I’m learning to do basic morph animation in ZBrush.

Cheers :smiley:

Thanks for sharing info. …