Hello,
I am in search of advice regarding best practices for managing materials in Zbrush from one tool to another. Since this topic has probably been brought up before, feel free to just direct me to another thread. I’m not certain what search terms would be appropriate.
http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/materials-lights-rendering/materials/
My understanding is that materials are handled as slots, kind of like paint splotches on a palette, and its recommended that you only have so many of them in the Materials folder at one time… correct?
However, each tool you create may need its own specific set of materials. This would seem to suggest that every time you begin work on a new tool, if you intend on creating new materials, you’ll want to remove all the old materials in the Zbrush ZStartup\Materials folder out, so that you don’t end up creating dozens of new material slots that stack up over time.
Then what happens when you want to combine tools, or create a scene from multiple tools that refer to these separate material “collections”… if they are no longer in the ZStartup\Materials folder?
I have also found it annoying to be re-applying materials just because the slots got out of order. I’m not certain how to control this, since the slots don’t seem to be numbered, and materials don’t seem to “stay” in a particular slot… when you add a new material everything gets shifted over.
I apologize if I’ve overlooked a simple and obvious technique!
Thanks for any help…