ZBrushCentral

Image Plane texturing....selectively

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi everyone

Thank you for image plane, it’s awesome.

In my never ending quest to maximize quality in zbrush texturing, I have ran into a small problem.
First off, I prefer projection master texturing because texture quality can get bottlenecked via model resolution, when using a poly-painting technique. (Zproject painting, etc)
so my workflow is as follows, roughly:

1: Texture>>Image Plane>>Load Texture into background
2: Position model according to texture
3: Projection Master>>Drop Now
4: Texture>>Image Plane>>Load Texture onto image plane
5: move and nudge the image plane so that the texture fits nicely onto model
6: Projection Master>>Pickup Now

i left out little steps like making sure that the model has a bright white material on it, and also the projection master parameters and such.

This way, as long as my UV coordinates are good and my Texture Map is a good size, don’t lose any resolution from the image I am using to map on.

My question is…is there any way to selectively do this? Can I “paint” on portions of the Image Plane image, or do I have to project on the whole thing? One way I have found is to hide portions of the model I do not want textured prior to Dropping it on the canvas…is this the only way? is there some way to softly mask portions before doing this whole procedure?

Did any of this make sense? Sorry for the long post, BTW.

-matt

#2

Why don’t you use Spotlight?

#3

Spotlight is a phenomenal tool, but it is based in polypainting. That means that the resulting texture is limited to the polygon resolution of the model. Even a model that has several million polygons, like 10 million or so, does not retain all of the resolution of a high-res texture. Working in HD, sometimes you can’t settle for any loss of texture “crispness”.
Using Projection Master with Image Plane, the source imagery never goes though a “polypainted” stage, so you have a much better chance of not sacrificing image quality/resolution.