I can't remove 2018 materials, even using FillObject with flat color, in ZB 2019

[CWR63]

Additionally when I fill object with a Material or even Mrgb, it doesn’t stick and just reverts to whatever material is being used currently, as if it had not been FillObject-ed. I can’t remove the shiny shiny from the braids, consequently it doesn’t match the hair it’s supposed to be a part of. Is there an old lightcap on the object or material I need to remove (and how do I do that?):

Do I just need to copy all my materials from 2018 over? Or reactivate it? I deactivated it when installing 2019 - I was going to move it to a backup SSD to save space on my boot drive and just make shortcuts to all of the millions of alphas, materials and huge project files that have been piling up since 4R6…

Moreover, there’s some weirdness with 80 some odd of the same material under standard materials:

[CWR63]

I tried turning off the lights in the scene, and this was the result:

No object has masking active BTW. Also the 2 tones of metal in the staff are another example of materials that won’t change even though they too are supposed to be the same material.

[Extra_Dimensional]

I’m going to ask the obvious and have you tried turning off the colorize object in the polypaint menu to see if you baked the old materials into these subtools? If you turn off colorize and you’re still not getting the material that’s active in the material palette to show up then you’ve baked polypaint and material info as the shader for that subtool. If you baked them you can try to get around that by deleting your UV’s on a duplicate of the subtool and clearing any texture in the texture menu, just to see if that clears the problem then copy and paste UV’s from your old piece to the new clean one and replace it that way. I mean that’s what I’d do and if that doesn’t work I don’t know as I’ve never seen that issue with all those copies of a material in the material palette before something else may be going on. And if so maybe someone else who has run into this knows.

[CWR63]

I’ve fixed the weird standard materials duplicates by copying in materials from 2018.

To somewhat fix the braids that would not change materials I went into the material modifiers and copied a shader from white matcap into shader 1 (S1) but I still can’t fix a material for the main hair using FillObject - and here’s the weird thing; when I mouse over FillObject the popup box reads “Fill 3D Object Masked”.

Now the first thing I do everytime a new version of Zbrush comes out is to go to Shane Olson’s 3D Character Workshop for his interface - it is the only interface for me, to, perhaps, crippling effect. I probably couldn’t operate a standard layout without several days of adjustment. But I highly doubt he edits any popup boxes - can anyone tell me if the standard layout has this as well? And what does that mean? Because fill object sometimes works.

So, on most subtools materials (both with and without UVs and/or texture maps) materials can be changed and locked in using FillObject, but some subtools cannot have their materials locked down using FillObject and always change depending on the current material, and still others have materials that cannot be changed except in the material modifier.

I’m going to strip UVs from a duplicate for subtools with ‘locked’ materials as you suggested - but I still am at a loss about subtools which will not allow materials to be ‘locked’ using FillObject. Currently I’m doing multiple renders for compositing in post, but multiplied by the number of NPR filters I want to use, as well as different BG and FG elements, well, I’m up to 86 renders for the main figure alone, without the ground, background trees and rocks or foreground snow and ice swirling…

[Extra_Dimensional]

Yeah Fill Object now says Fill 3d Object masked, not sure when that was a thing but I noticed it for the first time the other day myself when I ran into weirdness with tools that were filled with MRGB info changing on me. Found out that was because when you load or have the same name of a material over the current material it will swap it with whatever was loaded on top of it regardless if your material is filled with MRGB info, but that was specific to my problem which doesn’t sound like yours because mine had an easy fix. All I had to do was select a blank material or one I never use and load my material over that one and my problem went away, which is all stuff I used to know but haven’t textured in a great long while in zbrush. Only with the new render filters have I been inspired to texture here again so I have to relearn many things I have forgotten.

Try a fresh install maybe just takes a few minutes, a separate directory on another drive as a test bed for this model to see if your problem is related to your install as I assume it is looking at all those duplicate materials you have which is a huge red flag something is horribly wrong. I always do a fresh install each revision as I believe I ran into weirdness of some sort of another way back like this that I didn’t fix until I started clean again. It’s a lot of work and I had to set aside a weekend to clean everything as I too have millions of collected assets it seems from over the years that I like to keep around and at the same time I also like a clean interface and to be not be overwhelmed with options, which takes a balancing act.

Don’t know if I can be of help here, hope you get it sorted out. I’d try a fresh clean install on another drive personally and isolate issues until I found what was causing it but I’m like a dog with a bone that way.

[CWR63]

My only questions are what would be considered a blank material, and how would I load one material over another?

The method of duplicate and delete UVs and copy from original etc. seems to work well for ‘unlocking’ materials. However once unlocked, these subtools join the rest that will only display the current material - EXCEPT if the subtool has no texture. I think. I was finally able to get the fur trim on the cape to accept a material, so there’s that.

The snow covered ground is the problem - the other unlockable subtools look good with Haz_Rimlight_Skin but pink snow just looks like strawberry ice cream. So I’m gonna pump up the subdivisions and polypaint from texture while a suitable material is applied - see if turning off texture works. Oh yeah, matcap or standard makes no difference in this problem.

I also am dogged and patient, but this is wearing me down…

[CWR63]

Okay…that worked. So having a texture on a subtool keeps it from retaining a material? Is very confuse.

Of course that 3000 point subtool is now 1.8 mil points - not a practical solution, really.

[CWR63]

Just for fun, while at high subdiv, I create\Texture Map
ew from polypaint\ (automatic Texture On) and lower SDiv down to 2 from 5…and it retains the material now. WTH

That’s it for me today, my brain’s too tiny for this fun.

[Extra_Dimensional]

Yeah that’s what I was talking about “baking” in my first reply, maybe it’s an old term but that’s what I was referring to, when you “bake” your polypaint/material info into your texture, it will stay baked until you disable it. However the thing to watch out for is your materials, hrm trying to phrase this in a way that’s not even more confusing. If I have a material named skin shader 1 and I bake that material and polypaint into a subtool by the method you just described in your last post, it will look that way when I load up my model again no matter what material I have loaded, as long as texture and polypaint are turned on, zbrush remembers those settings per subtool but I’m not sure how it works with folders now but all seems to be well, on my side at least. However if you have something weird going on with the exact naming of your materials things can go awry. And if your zbrush directory is having weird issues with duplicate material names and such as you showed here, I can see things being weird as a result, looks like you’re on your way to sorting it out though cool.

Regarding “blank material”, Now let’s say I have that baked subtool active and I have skin shader 1 as my material specifically selected in my material palette and I hit “load” in the material palette to load a new material. Regardless of my baking it will overwrite my material info with whatever material I load over skin shader 1. So to get around this you’ll click another material in the material palette first, when I say “blank material” I could be more specific what I mean is something you don’t have any edits to and is unused in your model or scene. Like one of the gel shaders or something in the material palette just click that first, then load the other material you want to have if you’re trying to load another material. Or else you’ll straight up overwrite your skin shader 1 in this example with the new loaded texture, it’s just something to watch out for is all. Yeah watch out for baked materials, it’s just how zbrush works and isn’t a bug or anything, you have to disable/enable these things in the palette options and kind of be in control of all this or else it tends to run away with you. But who can keep track of all this on older models haha, especially the older complex ones we revisit.

[CWR63]

Thank you for that clarification - I didn’t realize using polypaint from texture also baked the matcap info as well…also read some technical stuff about how all materials in ZB are actually the flat color mat but then the other materials are just emulated through that flat color? I did a KeyShot render, thinking to make an end run with the new universal camera to use clownpass for compositing. But this camera was as jumpy as it was in Zbrush - whenever a subtool is loaded the camera would jump back and go to AC (autocrop) in Zbrush, and when objects are hidden or unhidden in Keyshot it would flip out similarly, which resulted in a slight misalignment when adding geometric lights:

This is an attempt to composite ZB NPR and KS images, you can see a slight alignment problem at the bottom of the skirt (the thin white line). Even with the camera locked and saved in KeyShot 7 I still had to realign by eye after each time a light was added or moved - lights which you can hardly tell are even there for all the effect they have. Compositing the NPR images from ZB looks good, but there are no emissive materials and lighting is hit and miss when using matcaps:

A real problem is when I try to bring in the snowflakes from DAZ - if the universal camera is within the sphere of the largest dimension of the largest subtool it will go to AutoCrop, basically back to ZB’s old 2.5D camera. So to move it far enough away to prevent this it’s going to basically look telephoto, having to dolly so far back and then zoom so far in to avoid the AC:

Daz Studio IRAY just looks so…Daz. Plus it takes over 2 hours to render a 1/4 size image - this is for RedBubble graphic tee, which covers the entire front panel of the shirt, 7770x9830 pixels - Zbrush BPR tops out at 8K, but it’s close enough. I can see about taking it into Marmoset Toolbag 3, but I’m starting to wilt thinking about adapting the textures and lighting for yet a fourth program.

Okay, I’m just grousing at this point. Allow me to thank you for your time and effort explaining the idiosyncrasies of Zbrush materials - I’m going to take a run at making a render without worrying about compositing with other programs’ renders - mebbe replace the matcaps with standards so I can get control of the lighting using a lightcap…

[CWR63]

It says edit or delete post, but there’s no way to delete a post, apparently =!SQBG02b_proc.jpg|1200x2458

[CWR63]

[FONT=Verdana]Okay, I remembered a bit more (and learned a bit more) about lighting in KeyShot - although the imported camera is still acting weird - I’m currently working on getting the snow in there (have to move the lighting planes out-of-frame so that the alphas on the snowflakes aren’t visible) then I can experiment with DOF to replicate the effect that I like from the DAZ renders:

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The DOF effect I like for the snow from DAZ:

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The cameras are close enough (between Zbrush and KeyShot, not DAZ) that I should be able to composite the elements I want from each programs’ renderings.