I’ve been working on a few stencils in ZBrush that I ultimately want to use with a brush to help assist with my sculpts. I’ve been mainly using ‘grabdoc’ in the alpha palette to grab the Z information. This seems to work fine. If I then export this alpha into photoshop for further processing ( clean up, blurring, etc) and re-import it, the thumbnail is blank, and it doesn’t work. The images I’m exporting out of ZBrush are 16-bit .tiffs in greyscale, which seems to be the default. I’ve tried converting them to RGB. I’ve tried making sure there’s no alpha. The only thing that would work is if I saved it out as an 8-bit JPG. My question is… what format does the alpha want? Does it only accept images above an 8-bit bit depth if they’ve been created within ZBrush and have not been edit in any way?
It sounds like you are not using ZBrush 4R5. What version are you using?
Actually, I am using 4R5. I also have 4R4. I’ve yet to check if the older version is doing the same thing. The main issue right now is that i’ve created an alpha that I want to use with the dragRect stroke. I’d love to be able to export it to photoshop so I can feather the edges a bit but since when I export , edit, and re-import the alpha no longer works, i’m at a loss.
Go to ‘Preferences>Performance’ and turn the ‘PreLoad File Size’ slider to maximum. Then you should be able to import 16 bit Grayscale images. That might fix it. At least that worked on older versions.
If TIF isn’t working, try PSD instead.