Can someone help me fix artifating when using a custom made Alpha?

[Mechanicalhorizon]

I made some custom alphas to use on a project, and have them working, for the most part.

But I’m getting some weird artifacting when they are applied. See pic:

I made the alphas in Illustrator; 300dpi. I then exported them as PNG files (I also tried PSD,JPG, and SVG).

The object is subdivided to just over 4 million points (which I thought was enough).

I don’t have this issue with any of the alphas that come with Zbrush, only the ones I made.

But in Illustrator, the black area is all black. The edges are clean as well.

I have no idea how to correct this.

[Spyndel]

Hello @Mechanicalhorizon

This looks like an issue with the underlying topology of the mesh, not with the alpha itself.

Going by just the lines I see, it looks like the surface your are displacing is made up of mostly long, stretched rectangles. This is what’s causing those long vertical artifacts. In addition to the shape of the topology, it probably needs subdivided a bit more to diminish the stair stepping on the rounded portions.

The ideal topology for working in Zbrush is evenly distributed quads, as close to square shaped as possible. Attempting to sculpt or paint on polygons that are stretched or oddly shaped will produce poor results. I would use either Dynamesh or ZRemesher here to remesh your target mesh into a better form. Remember that sculpting and painting detail is dependent on mesh resolution.

[Mechanicalhorizon]

Thanks for the advice, I didn’t think about remeshing after subdividing since the object was pretty simple (just a rectangle). I’ll give that a try and let you know how it goes.

[Mechanicalhorizon]

Well, I got it working for the most part. There is still some pixellating, but since this is going to be 3D printed at a smaller scale, I don’t think it will be noticeable.