I’ve gotten a few questions on this topic. Apparently I had some inspirational post somewhere or something, but I don’t know what I said, or where that post is.
Anyways, I came up with a pretty good method of creating seamless textures across multiple UV sets in Zbrush. I haven’t had time to create a full tutorial with images, or anything. I sent this to Aurick a while back, but obviously they’re all very busy as well, and Aurick himself has that book he’s writing…
Anyways, here it is. I hope it answers some questions, and helps someone else out. I don’t know if it’s an entirely original idea, but I don’t think I’ve heard other people talk about it. It’s kind of obvious when you think about it, it’s just a bit of work.
step 1: Load your mesh, as well as both textures you want to blend the seams from. You can do more than two, but it can get very confusing. Save copies of each in case you screw up.
step 2. Activate one texture, and go to a view that shows a lot of the seam. The more of the seam is shown in a fairly planar view, the better.
step 4: Activate ZAppLink. In photoshop (preferably) clone the window by clicking “create new document from current history state” in the history palette.
step 5: Go back to zbrush, and pick up your mesh again. do not change the view. Switch to your other texture and go back into projection master, and activate ZAppLink again, and update the file in Photoshop.
step 6: I usually use masks from each file and overlay them so that i have one layer that contains one texture, and one that contains the other. from there, you simply paint away the seams however works for you, though the healing brush and clone tools work well.
step 7: When you’re finished, clone the window again. You’ll need it. If you still have the original mask from the last zapp, you can use that to mask out the part of the ‘other’ texture, leaving just the section of the active texture that you just fixed. for instance, if you have the torso texture open, mask out the head or arms to avoid changing those.
step 8: Go back to zbrush and preview the changes and make sure they look right. If it looks correct, accept, and pick up your mesh. DO NOT CHANGE THE VIEW OR YOU’LL HAVE TO START OVER
step 9: Switch to the other texture, drop into projection master, zapp over to photoshop, and overlay the other ‘half’ of your fixed image onto the active texture area. Save the file, go back to zbrush, preview the changes, and if it looks good, pick up your mesh again.
I’ve found that sometimes if you have an area like the shoulder that you’re fixing, you need to hide all but the two areas you are working on to avoid projecting things into the uvs of a part you’re not working on. If another area gets screwed up, don’t worry, just load the original copy of the texture, as well as the one with the fixed seams, and overlay the old onto the new, and paint a mask so that the file has the original “correct” texture plus the fixed seam.
I’ve also found that if you show only the part of the mesh with the active texture, such as the torso (the UV groups under polygroups can help with this), it works pretty well, and you don’t have to worry about having to mask out the other area. Yes, Zbrush smooths the mesh when you go into projection master, but if your mesh is dense enough that half pixel that the mesh “contracts” won’t matter. Trust me, you really can’t see the seam.
It’s slow going, and very tedious, but it gets the job done, and it’s at least easier than doing it in photoshop alone. I liked this approach a bit better than the version that included cloning the texture, as i could easily see what was done, and what wasn’t done, just by flipping back and forth.
Something else that helps is the fact that zbrush will read the psd files after you save them in photoshop if you import them into zbrush. Once you import it, it seems to keep a link to the file itself, but i’m sure most people know that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else already figured this one out, but here it is anyways. Hopefully this will be a short-term fix until 2.5 comes out. Enjoy, and happy Zbrushing!