I like how lightbox lets you use images to make 3d textures but I noticed that you cant paint the image info onto the model and then convert that projected image into 3d texture work using the sculpting brushes. I hope that makes sense. My issue with lightbox for 3d texture works is sometimes you cant judge the strength of the effect and how far the sculpting brushes will knock the shape work forward/back when using the image as a 3d texture stencil. So it seems to me it would be pretty cool if you could paint the color info from the image onto the model first and then use a sculpting brush over the image colored model to convert the image work into a 3d texture. This way you can better control the 3d texture effect. Is there a way to do this?
You can use Tool>Masking>Mask by Intensity. You will probably want to turn off Tool>Polypaint>Colorize so that the polypaint doesn’t show.
After your texture is painted, before sculpting, go to the masking menu and choose Mask By Intensity. This creates masking based on the color info of either your texture, or if you don’t have a texture, your polypaint.
Once you have a good value set for the intensity of the mask, you can start to sculpt the details. Very powerful in combination with Cavity Masking. With a little work you can use your texture and painting as a basis for sculpting if you get a good understanding of masking.
For instance, if you have a blob, and then texture it with a rock texture, it will look like a rock pretty much. But then you can bring out the details using masking by intensity and cavity masking. You can raise up the light areas and the dark areas will be masked off, giving quick dimension to your sculpt.
A good way to do this is by masking by intensity then inflating via deformation. This automatically raises up the lighter areas of value. Then you can invert the mask and deflate a little bit, further adding deformation to the sculpt. After that you can sculpt by hand and always use Intensity Masking and Cavity Masking to help refine the forms and protect areas that you don’t want to change.
*looks like Marcus beat me to it while I was typing
Thanks guys. I remember Lemonnado posting something about this way back in the day, but I couldnt find his post and I think his tut was for 2.5. I tried it back then with simple color shapes, and I just outright forgot how to do it. Now seeing how lightbox works with images and the detail levels. I want to try this trick again.
Will this work to hide the polypaint job?
Precreate a texture map from a solid white polypaint fill job.
Save it.
Turning it on and off should hide the polypaint image job right?
If you can save paint jobs in layers. Can you toggle through various individual layers and hide the others to use the intensity and cavity trick? This way you can toy around with the texture playabouts from layer to layer?
Edit:
Nope- Well not in zbrush 3.5 all my texturemap idea does is match the same level of color drop off that you would see when disabling the colorize from polypaint menu. Which is more of a ghost coloring effect.
Not near my computer with 4 right now, but I’m sure the results will be the same. I guess the walk around to hiding the polypaint image work would be to put it on a color layer. Turn that layer on and off to show or hide it. Turn it on to do the mask by intensity trick. Then turn it back off again to make the polypaint work disapear. Will have to try this out when I get back to my computer.