I was using an alpha map as a bump map and decided I wanted to edit it a bit. So I hit the Make TX button and all pure black (0,0,0) areas show up on the mesh as transparent (can see through the mesh and can’t paint in those areas) even though the Transparent Texture button is off.
Pure black is not the transparent color in Zbrush ?
Pilou
Yes, pure black is the color for transparency in Zbrush. But it should only happen when the “Transparent Texture” button is on, not off.
It is also used for transparency if the currently-selected alpha is not Brush 00 (the white square). Selecting alpha 00 will eliminate the transparency.
Then how do you use a texture and bump/displacement alpha map at the same time then? I guess this means you can’t. Or I guess one better make sure they don’t have any true black anywhere in their textures. This seems kind of odd to me what with a button there for controlling transparency lol. :rolleyes:
Thank you Aurick for confirming something that’s been driving me nuts this evening - late as I am to start switching over to v2, this was something that never happened in v1.55b.
It was only this evening that a texture I was using exposed this, containing as it did, areas of pure black.
Is there a workflow reason why v2 now defaults to this behaviour ?
It actually allows greater flexibility in the kinds of things that you can do when texturing. See my tutorial on Projection Painting, for example. Not all of those techniques would be possible without this feature.
In the case of the original question, you can easily edit your bump map if you’d like. After converting it to a texture, switch the Alpha to 00 (the white plane). This causes the texture to display with black being visible. In fact, you can even load the Bump Viewer material. In this case, the black and white color of the texture will disappear, displaying instead as bump on the model. So rather than trying to guess what the grayscale values will actually mean when rendered as bump, you can see the results in real time while you work.