ZBrushCentral

advice on efficient method for specific textures in InsertMesh surve brush -

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’ve some complex patterns going on in my InsertMesh Curve Brushes that I’ve made…
I have many of them on a character…
I want certain areas to be a certain material in my 3rd party programs (maya and lighteave) …
i want to be able to export those specific aspects from Zbrush.

should i polypaint the initial object that i create the curve brush from?
meaning… would i take the origonal object that i’d create the insertMesh curve brush from… and poly paint to it…
THEN create my brush then paint the brush?
any way i can more efficientize this?

for example you want every other link in a chain to be gold and every other-other link in the chain to be stone… (not my circumstances but an example for you to see)

i want certain areas of the chain of insertmesh strokes to be a certain material and certain areas to be different…
whats’ the most efficient method to designate them as such?

any advice?
thanks

#2

Your inserted meshes are going to be different polygroups from your support mesh. This means that you could duplicate your SubTool and then delete the IMM parts from the original version as well as deleting the support mesh part(s) from the duplicate. As a result you will now have two SubTools. One will be the original support mesh and the other will be what you added via IMM.

Now when you export the model you will be able to assign different materials to the separate groups.

Because a tri-part IMM is made up of three separate polygroups you could even use this technique to break the IMM portion apart and assign different materials to the start, middle and end.

However, you’re still going to run into trouble in your chain example because the part being repeated is always a single polygroup. I can’t think of any easy way to take things that far.

I hope that helps, though!