I applied a material to my model, added paint to it, and saved it (as a Subtool). However, whenever I reload it, the material is all messed up and seems to have half the default red wax and my metal material with its paint applied. Admittedly, it wouldn’t take long to redo it, but I’d rather not.
Any ideas what could have gone wrong or what I could do to fix it?
Thanks
It’s possible that you had only partially painted the material. Any polygons with no material data stored to polypaint will default to showing the currently active material instead. In your old scene that probably would have been the metal material you were painting, so the entire model would display it. In this new scene the active material is defaulting back to red wax. If you change the active material you’ll probably see the rest of the model update to whatever is selected.
Fixing it is easy enough if you want the entire model to be one material. Select the material, make sure you have the ‘M’ Draw button turned on, then go to Color: Fill Object. This will fill the entire object with that material.
If you fill the model with the special ‘Flat Color’ material then you can use this method to remove all material data from polypaint.
It’s also important to understand what types of data are saved with the different types of files Zbrush saves.
For instance, if you saved this as a tool in the tool menu, any changes to a default material selction will not be saved. So if you modified a material, you would have to save out that custom material in the material menu, and then reload it into the same material slot that is applied to your mesh in order to re-apply it to a .ztl.
A .zpr, saved through the file menu, will save all custom materials as well.
Excellent. Thank you. And it was as simple as that… 
I still seem to be having issues with this. I have a ground mesh, which I set up with a specific material, colour, and modifiers. I made sure RGB and Material were enabled, applied them with FillObject, I save the tool, I reload it, and everything’s fine. If I quit the application though, and reload it, I just get a light brown colour and it looks like porridge. ZMetal always seems to be the material set on the left hand side as well, despite not even using that. o_O
However, if I save my tool/project using File > Save As, it’ll load up correctly. But saving it as my SubTool gives me the issue. Surely I can have the correct material, colour, and modifiers applied by saving it as a SubTool…? Or is it because it has issues with modifiers…?
Before:
After:
I addressed this in your previous post on the subject. Custom materials are not saved when saving as a tool (.ztl, via Tool> Save As). Only the material “slot” is saved, with whatever material occupies that slot by default.
So, for instance, if you saved the tool with the Red Wax material applied but made changes to that material, the .Ztl. will load with the original Red Wax applied but not with any changes you made to it.
In order to re-apply those changes to a .ztl, you would have to save the modified material out of the Material palette as a .zmt, then load that .zmt in the same menu into the red wax material slot on your freshly loaded .ztl. The custom .zmt will then overwrite that slot with with your changes anywhere that original red wax was applied.
Saving your file as a .zpr, via the File> Save As menu will save custom materials with no further action required, but is a less economical file format than a .ztl, saving lots of other information as well. So generally, one might work on the tool’s geometry early on via the .ztl format, or in a situation where that additional data isn’t required, then switch over to a project file when setting up a scene or a render. The reason you would care about file economy is because the larger a file gets the more potential performance concerns come with it, depending on system.
Sorry. Yes, looking back, you did address the issue. :S Thanks for clarifying again.