So here's my first near-finished model ever. Huge thanks go out to Scott Spencer (my teacher at Gnomon) and the assorted guys from Gentle Giant that are students in my class. C & C welcome, please be honest, as this will hopefully be the beginning of a reel for me. Please bear in mind I have no traditional art background, neither in sculpting nor painting. My background is in drafting, engineering and architecture. Hooray me, 36 and trying to find my inner artist, I never would have guessed I'd even try. Oh, and questions on ZBrush follow the images...
And now on to the questions...
materials questions:
First off, let me say I am a complete newb when it comes to materials. I have some practice with sculpting and now also a little bit with painting, but less than 1 day with materials.
The wiki says to use the 'bake' button to lock down different materials into the flat shader (I read the wiki first, I promise!). So to try this, I have assigned different materials to different groups (not subtools). Toy plastic for the fangs/eyes, material 43 from material pack 2 for the skin. I hide all but the parts I want to change material on, set it so that only Material button is on, and click fill under the color palatte. Then I hide the opposite parts, and change material, and click fill again. Everything appears how I want it now. I did not modify any of the materials at all. I then hit 'bake', and all still looks good. I save the tool, close zbrush, reopen, load tool, and everything is toy plastic (not what I want). I try it again, set materials to different parts, bake, save, close, reopen, load tool, and the eyes/teeth are toy plastic like I want, but the skin is red wax shader. Super confused here, any help? I'm obviously missing a step.
Also, when using Image Plane 3 with Projection Master, I cannot get the color to transfer when I pick the tool up, unless I have Material checked. Shouldn't this just need color checked? How is this requiring material? This I assume relates to my above material newbiness.
Also, sometimes when I use a material, then switch to another, I can no longer find that material thumbnail in either the side or top materials palettes. This is happening with standard materials like toy plastic and jellybean. How do I get them to show up, all the time? Where do they go, and why?
Is this an acceptable way of applying materials, simply group the items I want to use one material, apply material (fill button in color palette), group others, apply another material? What is recommended?
A few non material related questions:
I prefer my tool and transform menus on the left, so I put em there, and saved out a .cfg file. How do I get this to load automatically every time I start ZBrush? Does the .cfg file need to be named something specific, and where should it be put? Would be nice to eliminate the step of loading it every time I start up zbrush.
I prefer the little XYZ rotate icon be turned 'on' by default, and this didn't save when I made my cfg file. How do I get this to default to on?
What does the Local Symmetry button do, how is it used specifically? A simple link would be great, I'm sure there's info somewhere already.
How do I get something to pop out to a uniform depth, then stop, not go higher with repeated brush strokes?
As afar as making a simple turntable movie, are there any settings anyone would recommend? I'd like to get the head to slowly spin around twice, at the nicest resolution/render possible, to be added to a reel. I am setting the recording FPS to max (which seems to be 20 with the slider) and the playback FPS to 30, as recommended by my instructor, but the thing is spinning too fast. The preview movie looks just how I want, but when I open the .mov file, it spins far too fast. Any recommendations on what to tweak to slow it down, or any other settings I should use here?
Thanks in advance, this community has beena huge inspiration to me, and an invaluable resource. Thanks thanks thanks!
~Matthew