I know what they are but I want to create my own specific alphas. I have photoshop. so
How do I do it ?
hmm well hitting the search button above and entering “creating alphas” yielded 5 pages of results here…i did not go thru all of them but am sure there are some great little how to tidbits about photoshop and making alphas in some of them…however zbrush is fantastic for creating any kind of alpha you might need and this great little tutorial by Aurick should get you started.
then go to the challenges forum and checkout all the newbie challenges…most of them deal with creating alphas in zb as well.
just make a greyscale .psd image… crop it to a sensible size… and it’s an alpha… load it into ZBrush and use it… it’s that simple
a little tip… dont get rid of the original image you made that greyscale alpha from… load it as a texture in zbrush (cropped to the same size, of course), and use it in conjunction with the alpha… use a tool that allows you to use both alphas and textures in the same stroke… and suddenly you’re both painting and sculpting directly using a photograph
a friend and I experimented with this and got some pretty cool results with Z2… havent tried it with Z3 yet… but take a rocky texture… make your basic rock shape… drop it into projection master… dragrectangle stroke with a matching alpha & texture… and suddenly you have a perfectly surface detailed & textured rock in one swift stroke
go crazy!
Pop over to the challenge forum and look for my Newbie Challenge on Brushes. There are several movies provided which look at numerous ways of creating alphas, both in ZB itself, and in graphics apps. THe actual process may be slightly different with 3.1 (the vids were made with 3.0), but you’ll get the idea.
Sorry for resurrecting a old thread but would someone please tell me which tools would allow to paint and sculpt at the same time from one photograph ( with a black/white version of it).
It appears to work with the standart brush in the polypaint mode using a standard brush and a texture.
Thanks for helping out!