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Lightbox question

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I love the idea of Lightbox and its ability to search for images to use for textures and load them right inside of zbrush.

My question is if by using yahoo or another search engine to search for images, don’t we step into the realm of copyright infringement?

Couldn’t this tool be “linked” to some type of free image/texture source (texturemate.com, cgtextures.com) or could Pixologic compile images for their customers that would be free to use?

Any thoughts on this topic would be very helpful.

Thank you

#2

For every project you can search for reference material. You always have to look carefully for copyright. Lightbox is just making it easier to take the references into the program!

#3

every photograph has a copyright. It is either available to be used or it isn’t. That is the issue. Pulling random images from the net makes it a very grey area.

Reference material is one thing, but this is a little more than just using it as a reference.

#4

It’s not like you can do anything now that you couldn’t before - the process has just been streamlined. People have always been pulling images off the web to use in various ways. And as always it’s up to the person using the image to make sure they have the right to use it.

I really can’t see Pixologic dedicating their energies to compiling royalty-free libraries for us to use - there are so many of them out there already.

#5

Actually I think that Jack touched a delicate point. When browsing the web, one has to carefully look for copyight rules about the images to be used in a project.
In some way, the streamlined process to find them directly inside ZB, could on the other hand make less “direct” to perform the control.
I think it is not a bad idea to have ZB link to a sort of “protected” database of free images. This would really make more streamlined the whole process, without having to check the issue for every single image.

Ciao

#6

LightBox is a container and how much is clean depends on the user…

#7

Clearly the program doesn’t allow for a “grabdoc” snapshot from a lightbox web image loaded up in Spotlight on your canvas nor does it in anyway facilitate transfering the texture to the texture palette where it would be easy to save as an exported file. I don’t see any means to do that.

Anyone can work around that,of course. And you can ctl + dble click on the image in lightbox and get taken directly to the web page where anyone can grab the image if they intend to. And that would be wrong on the part of the user of zbrush and not the intended use of lightbox. And as said, you can do that just as well in your own browser.