How is the colorize mesh switch different from starting a texture as described in the quick start? (http://pixologic.com/zbrush/class/zquickstart.html)
I don’t have the quick start thing in front of me.
but you don’t necessarily need a texture for the colorize option. With colorize on you paint with very limited tool…ie the same sculpting tool you use directly on the model and can only use colors…no alphas etc. It allows you to do some things quickly…like see some basic color setups that you can paint on quickly while still being able to rotate your model…it’s not dropped to the canvas like it is in PM. You then have the option if you want to convert it to a texture. col>tex
you can also do a tex>col…which you could say map your uv’s to and in ps for instance using your uv’s as a guide draw where you might want to sculpt or add detail and then use the tex to color option to lay that on your model as a guide while you are sculpting in real time etc etc…
another cool thing you can do is paint materials on…I love this option because it allows me to tweak materials with a given light set-up, see how it looks, change it, rotate my model around, see where to add some specularity etc, kinds of stuff without having to drop it down in pm and pick it up and drop it down and pick it up etc. Another way cool thing is you can mask parts of your model, paint a material on it, invert the mask and do another material…get nice clean lines usually and see how those look with another material loaded so that both materials share the same attribute lighting etc of that third material…if that makes some sense…you kinda have to try it to see what I mean.
to paint with a texture you need PM and can’t paint in realtime but you also have the whole world at your finger tips in terms of tools you use to make your texture.
I hope that answers the question without having seen the tutorial…I’ll take a look when I get a chance so I can see if I blew it or not hahahaha.
did a little script of the colorize option
Thanks aminuts. I caught your post earlier (this week?) about painting materials. Neat stuff.
I’ve used colorize mesh before, so that’s easy enough.
However after following the quickstart guide, it has you just painting in rgb with zadd off while the tool is live, but not in projection master mode. Which is basically the same thing you do with the colorize mesh option, at least the user experience is about the same.
One difference is that when you follow the quickstart method you have to create a texture first and then start painting and then hit fix-seams occaisionally. (BTW, link is in the first post). It could be my imagination but it seems like I can paint a bit more accurately in this mode over colorize mesh mode.
One thing I have noticed in the past is that attempting to create a texture out of the colorized mesh isn’t straight forward. The texture created didn’t really match what I had painted. It’s easy to fix though by just turning off the texture.
hey good eye Bill,
just checked it out. Seems pretty much the same in my quicky test. You can also paint materials same way. Didn’t get a chance to see if matoverwrite works with it as well tho.
by hitting fix seams it is definitely better in the saving the colors/materials to texture department than using colorize that’s for sure.
I am thinking I like it better than the colorize mesh option at the moment.
the thing I do like about colorize is being able to have my materials “on” my mesh…say a skin mat setup with a different texture over it so you can see how the materials affect the texture without painting over them on the texture which I can’t really do with this method. They both are good. I think colorize gives you an extra option or two but it’s harder to save to texture when you are ready to.
am gonna have to experiment some more…my favorite thing to do:D
When painting in colorize mode, you’re painting vertices. Better quality means that you need more vertices/polygons since each vertex can only contain one color. The advantage here (beyond what aminuts said) is that you can undo.
When painting like this with a texture selected, you are actually editing the texture. That means a higher level of detail is possible than could be achieved with all but the heaviest meshes. The down side is that you can’t undo.
I was also thinking that you could combine “straight” color with different materials in the colorize mode.
I hadn’t realized that you couldn’t undo the strokes in the paint mode. I don’t think that’s a big deal though as you can always put more paint on.
The “paint a vertex” aspect seems like an odd hack. Vertices represent a point in space, and don’t have any dimension. What zbrush seems to do when you paint a vertex is pick an adjoining face to colorize when you’re in quick mode.
When you shut off quick mode, zbrush then colors the area surrounding the vertex, and averages it with the the colors of nearby vertices. The size of the “blob” created will be dependent on the location of the vertices.
There also seem to be differences with what you can do to the parametric object v.s. polymeshes (as per usual). I didn’t have the wherewithal to enumerate them though.