ZBrushCentral

Alpha of Document

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

How do I generate a solid black and white alpha of my document that I can use to knock out the background of my document in Photoshop, leaving only my sculpt. If I use Grab Doc to make an alpha, it gives me an image that’s more appropriate for a depth map than an alpha. I want a solid black and white knockout.

I’ve tried adjusting the alpha depth factor and it just resets itself when I hit the Grab Doc button.

Only workaround I can think of off the top of my head is to make my background black in ZBrush, and apply a white Flat Color material to my tool. That seems unnecessarily involved though just to make an alpha.

#2

If you set the render to flat pretty sure you can get a crisp alpha once you export the document as a .psd.

Either that or you could use the character sheets plugin, as it generates an alpha automatically.

#3

Setting the render mode to flat presents two problems:

  1. Subtool dimming leaves everything except the active subtool gray instead of white.

  2. I still have to manually make my background black before I export the document.

I’ll do a search for the plug-in you called “character sheets” and see if that does the trick. Thanks.

#4

turntable master does this.

1, if all your subtools are filled with paint that won’t happen, you can use subtool master to quickly fill them all.
2. is it really that hard? choose color black, document: background

#5

No it’s not hard at all, and in fact none of this is really that big of a problem for me. I just thought there might be some quick and easy way to output an apha of the document that I wasn’t aware of. There isn’t - at least not without some fiddling or plug-in useage - so I have my answer. Thanks.

#6

What I do is take the Alpha grab and export it to Photoshop. There, I can use the Levels feature to convert it to pure black and white.

The benefit of this is that the depth grab is very useful as well. For example, you can use it to generate a nice depth of field effect in Photoshop.

#7

You’re the man, aurick. That works great, thanks.

#8

Assuming you have UVs assigned to all subtools, you can also just load an all white texture map (at least in 3.1).

Sven

#9

Hi Aurick,

Please could you direct me or explain how to do this in photoshop.
I cant find the the layer settings of the depth grab over the best render to do this properly.Excuse my lack of knowledge,Ive asked for help several times in the gallerys but get ignored .
Many thanks
cal

#10

@calum5ZB check this out:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpost.php?p=555065&postcount=20

#11

Thanks Dustin,Im over their now!:+1:

cal