I don’t know why I keep randomly losing material assignments.
Situation (with Material Channel button selected):
With the first subtool selected I press “Fill Object” with material #1.
With the second subtool selected I press “Fill Object” with material #2.
—At this point it “sometimes” it overwrites the first subtool.
With each new subtool or when I reload the tool the odds of running into this problem increase.
I appreciate you’re help…
Make sure you have M or Mrgb selected (top if the UI or in the Draw palette). Remember that if you have texture maps on your model these will hide materials. Also, if you are using custom materials then you need to save the project so that they are reloaded.
Yes M or Mrgb are selected.
No texture maps.
This happens with standard materials as well as custom.
Can you post an image showing the effect and the whole UI as described here : http://www.zbrushcentral.com/announcement.php?f=101. That way we may be able to see what’s going wrong.
Thanks,
Win 7, Dual Core AMD 9GB Ram
First I load the model subtools.
Everything loads correct except the eye material.
I go to the eye subtool and load the eye mat. Upon loading it, the fur mat changes to eye mat.
I Fill Object in the eye subtool.
Then I return to the Fur layer and load the fur mat.
Upon loading the material, the fur and the eye change to the fur mat.
This doesn’t always happen. I tried duplicating it with spheres and couldn’t.
Thanks for your help!
this looks to me like the Material number, each material has its own slot number, by making all your materials on 48 they all read from that one, you need to make a different number for each material, simply copy the settings you want and paste into a different material you never use that has a different number.
of course i could be wrong, but its worth a shot.
i’m surprised this behavior hasn’t been changed in z4.
Thanks Spaceboy that worked!
I’m able to make it work by using copymat pastemat into different slots. Is there a procedure for doing this?
It seemed perplexing not finding other posts about this issue.
Thanks for the pics and step-by-step, that’s a great help. 
As Spaceboy says (thanks Spaceboy ), this is to do with materials being arranged in ‘slots’. If you load a new material it will replace the selected material as it is being loaded into that material slot. This does have advantages - it means you can easily change a material at any time. It also keeps ZBrush responsive by limiting the number of materials.
It’s also important to remember that a 3D model will always take on the selected material unless a material has been embedded into it. To embed a material you make sure that M or Mrgb are on and then press Color>Fill Object. (Note that if Mrgb is on the model will also be filled with the selected color.)
You can change a material either by loading in a new material using the Material>Load button or by using the Material>CopyMat and Material>PasteMat buttons to copy and paste from one slot to another.
Also, if there are custom materials that you use often, you can make sure they are always available (in their own slots) by saving the files to the ZBrush 4R2\ZStarup\Materials folder. Don’t save more than 25 materials here and reduce the number if you find a difference to ZBrush’s performance.
If you load custom materials from disk during a ZBrush session make sure you save the Project (press File>Save As) rather than just the Tool. This will ensure that the materials are reloaded into the same slots next time you want to work on the project.
HTH,
Thanks Marcus