Hello, I am having trouble importing jpeg images into Zbrush.
The weird thing is some jpegs import fine and with others i get the error message “unable to read specified file.”
Are other users having this problem?
Anyone know how to fix or get around this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks!
are you sure its a .jpg? you don’t have the file extensions showing, does the file open in other apps? what bit is it? how large is it in pixel ratio?
I’ve had issues opening a photoshop jpeg in zbrush osx as an alpha, but could open it as a psd. Go figure, never complained, worked just fine using a psd (8 bit, rgb). Whatever.
Thanks for your replies spaceboy412 and Jamez.
spaceboy412 yes I am sure it is a jpeg I double checked.If you look realy close you can see the the file tipe filter is on so only bmp, psd, jpeg, and tiff files are showing.
And yes I do use these images in Painter and Photoshop all the time. I have a large collection of Dover clip art and other black and white images I use for brushes in Painter and that is what these are.
This one in particular is 2.5" by 2.4" in size and has a resolution of 72.
Does Zbrush have a minimum size on the images it will import?
Any help or thoughts appreciated.
Thanks
JPG files should not be imported into the Alpha palette. As a rule, they lack the quality to be used as a good alpha.
If you absolutely have to have a particular JPG as an alpha, import it into the Texture palette and then use the Texture>Make Alpha button to move it into the Alpha palette. But the fact is that the best alphas will be 16-bit Grayscale PSD files – NOT compressed JPG’s.
Hey aurick, thank you for the reply.
I fully agree that 16 bit PSD would be much better for adding details to 3D models.
I am actually using them for 2.5 D painting, just to get a base of interesting shapes and flow and composition before I take it to Painter to make it into a painting. So quality is not a big concern
However my question is still not answered.
The problem I am having is the I can’t import certain jpegs into zbrush at all, in the texture pallet or the alpha pallet.
IF you look at the screen shots you can see that in the example I was using the texture pallet when trying to import this image.
Any help or thoughts appreciated.
Why not just use psd’s anyways?
Jamez thanks for your reply.
Well it looks like I will end up using psds if I don’t find a more convenient solution soon. The only thing is that using psds in this case is a bit inconvenient as I already have a huge library of jpegs. And it is much easy to browse threw a huge library of jpegs as they will display as thumbnails when I am opening them.
PC or Mac? On Mac, you can see psd thumbnails and cover flow previews, but they come up really low res for some reason. You can still tell what is what by the image though. Either way, it’ll be a pain resaving all of those jpegs. Just name them good I guess…
I’d find out for sure if you need to save textures as 16 bit psd’s as well. I’d assume it’s the same as for alphas. Which is good information, I’ve been using 8 bit psd’s… :td: (ahhh, they’ve been working great 
)