ZBrushCentral

Baking a texture - MultiEye Shader tool

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi, testing this fun MultiEye by - Pablo Munoz G.
“Eye_Multi-Shader.ZMT”

Create MatCap, (EXR and TIF) open in Photoshop the image is RGB 32bit.
Not a problem, but it looks desaturated. Is this due to the material that is assigned?

  1. How to get the texture to look the same as it does in ZB?

MatCap to Texture (by- Pablo Munoz G.)
This is a pretty cool thing you can do with this shader (or any other shader). If you are a game artist or you simply want to finish your model in an external render, you can create a texture from the tweaked version of the Multi-Eye Shader.
To create the texture from the MatCap, all you need to do, is click on the button
“Create MatCap Texture” from the Modifiers Subpalette. This will create an image texture based on the MatCap:

  1. How to increase the MatCap texture size? (it’s currently at 1024px)

Thanks!

#2

Hi @sadicus

Are you trying to create a Matcap, or are you trying to create a Texture?

A Matcap is a simple material shader, mostly used for preview while modeling. It will not respond to changes in scene lighting like a standard material would. It generally shouldn’t be necessary to increase the resolution of the color map assigned beyond the default–it doesn’t hold any detail, only colors. It’s basically controlling the color and quality of the lighting applied to the object, independent of the scene lighting.

A Texture is an image that can contain detailed color information, such as that created when Polypainting. A Texture requires UVs to display properly. In this case, the image quality WILL vary depending on the resolution of the image. This is controlled with the UV map size slider when creating textures.

There are several things that can account for color textures appearing differently in one program or another.

  1. Color management policy mismatch (OS vs individual program). Some programs use the OS setting, others manage it locally. A mismatch between the two can cause differences in display of 2d images.

  2. If applied on a mesh, differences in that program’s render environment. Different scene lighting will make textures appear differently.

  3. In the case of a texture, the applied Material also contributes to the texture’s appearance. To view color information from polypaint or an applied texture in Zbrush as accurately as possible, independent of material, lighting, or 3D shading, assign the “Flat Color” material to it with a 100% white color active. Or change the render mode to "“Flat” in the render menu. “Preview” is the default.

#3

Thanks SPYNDEL, The question is specific to Pablo Munoz G MultiEye Shader.
The maps that are supplied are 1024px and I’d like to “Create MatCap Texture” at 4096px, but “Create MatCap Texture” is only saves a new texture as 1024px.

#5

You’ve updated your original post with additional information. You should contact the author of the tutorial you’re following for any questions on the steps involved.

Generally though, where the author tells you to use the “create matcap texture” function, it sends a special image with floating point data to the Texture palette. You would have to convert this to an 8 bit image to work with it as a color texture in Zbrush (unlocking options like re-sizing). I’m unaware of a way to do this in Zbrush directly. This doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it just means I never create Matcaps, so my experience is limited.

You can do this in an image editor, however. Matching the original image exactly may not be possible. The image editor will likely have conversion options to vary your results.

Also, certain Matcap materials may have a separate reflective shader applied with an image attached to it. You can plug an image of any size into this to improve reflection quality at closer magnifications.

#6

That seems to be a hard limit with the Matcap process.

yep, seems to be.
If the MultiEyeShader 1024px maps are replaced with 4096px and the geometry is subdivided it looks detailed., but the the Matcap process only captures at 1024px.

#7

Please see my previous post. It has changed since you updated your original post.