ZBrushCentral

LightBox WWW to Texture

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello

I’m struggling with a way of downloading an image from the WWW gadget of LightBox to the Texture slot and haven’t reached any success. I have tried with Shift+DoubleClick and all possible combination of cmds+DoubleClicks.
When you Shift+DoubleClick the thumbnail, the browser opens a related web page. In the meantime I’ve found that:

  • It seems like LightBox doesn’t save the downloaded image to the OS temporal folder but I think it stores the cached image in a proprietary format in ZStartup\TempFiles\images.mem file.

  • If you use the normal way (DoubleClick) to download the image to SpotLight, then you will not be able of transfer it to the Texture slot neither to disk :o

  • Once the image is in SpotLight you can save SpotLight contents, but it saves in a proprietary format file again. If you put this file in a folder and access them from LightBox, you can see this image’s thumbnail, but if doubleClickt it, it is opened by SoptLight and you can still spinning for all the night. :rolleyes:

  • The LightBox’s tab called “SpotLight” is a tenebrous dark place. What lives there?

Note:
Please, Marcus, if you read this post, lend us a hand in thread #92826 (Spotlight & Texture Painting)
Thank you.

#2

It makes sense that Pixologic isn’t going to provide the means of copying images that you can access via the browser function of Lightbox directly into the texture slot for exporting on to your hard drive. Certainly you can go on the internet and rip images yourself, which would of course be wrong, but I don’t think as a responsible company they’d put themselves in the position of helping with that dubious activity.

Spotlight provides the means of temporarily uploading images for reference and offers the possibility of extracting/altering parts of images in ways that don’t infringe on copyright laws for texturing purposes.

Its a beautiful thing.

#3

As you say, you can’t add images downloaded from the web to the texture palette. I don’t know whether this is a deliberate restriction or a technical one which will be addressed later.

#4

Nancyan is correct. Thanks:)

#5

I think the Lightbox image search is awesome, and I understand the ‘no save’ setup I suppose. I don’t really see a difference between using an image from a temporary file, or a file that I manually saved to my HD - but I guess the lawyers see it differently :slight_smile:

I made a similar suggestion on another thread, but -

Why not have an option for searching of sites like Flickr, Google, or the Wikimedia Commons that support filtering by Creative Commons?

With CC there is no confusion bout permissions. Plus, you can use it to give credit and thanks to the people who’s work you incorporated into your own. Lightbox could even help with the credits, keeping track of URLs and generating lists of used images.

#6

Well, needless to say that the intention here is not to rip any image neither to violate any copyright, but only to do texturing. You can’t texture with Spotlight, so you must do it by means of ImagePlane/Projection Master. It’s the only intention here. Any other supossed intention is beyond the usual activities of the professionals in this forum.

The step of saving to disk is only a possible way for transferring the image to ImagePlane. Thanks to both of you (Nancyan & Support), but your answers don’t help with the issue exposed in my post. It is all about doing in Projection Master/ImagePlane the same operations that with Spotlight/Polypainting.

You can rip images and violate copyrights with Spotlight/Polypainting in the same way as you can do it with textures, but this is not our job; our job is 3D. I don’t use polypainting, but textures instead, and am searching for making the new tools to work in texturing (only for clearing up any misunderstanding).

I think it is not a copyright issue, but it’s one more lack of ZBrush_4/Texturing. ZB4 seems to be a great release, but it seems to lack of texturing improvements.

I wanna congratulate the ZBrush team for this new release. I love the ShadowBox idea and Spotlight too. But it seems they lost sight of the texturing subsystem. Perhaps in a future release…

Best regards.

#7

Note: English is not my main language. Still learning. Expect some goof, please.

#8

My apologies to you ToniloCoyote if you thought my remarks about ripping copies was directed at you. It was a statement about the possibility in general.

I’m not sure what you mean about being unable to texture with spotllight. Just position the image, hit Z to remove the widget and paint the texture down on the surface of your object. The icons on the widget allow you to alter the image and when ready, just hit z and paint the altered (or not) image onto your mesh. And you leave zadd on its like sculpting thru an alpha to get depth as well as transferring the image.

Presuming you are using copyright free images or your own images you can always apply them to an image plane or fill the backround with the image and use the zproject brush since you have access to them in the texture palette…or load them up in spotlight and front project them. For that matter you can apply any spotlight image to a prepared 3d plane.

And a CC filter would be an enormous time saver and is an excellent idea.

#9

Nancyan

You don’t have to apologize for anything. I don’t dominate the English language in a natural way yet, and can’t transmit my ideas in the same context as I think them (when writing, I must make constant use of spelling checkers and other electronic helps). Immediately after my last post I added one more forewarning about this. At this moment, 8 hours later, that post has not been displayed in the thread; I’m a new member and all my posts must be approved by the moderator before being displayed. Sorry for that.

I don’t want to talk in this thread about what we are discussing in another:

“Spotlight & Texture Painting”
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=92826

In that thread, which I referred you to in other one, we can talk about the differences between Polypainting versus Projecting onto textures, and their pros and cons. I think it’s better to gather all related comments in a single thread.

In this one, I was asking the way of doing the same you do with LightBox/Spotlight but with LightBox/Projection Master (this time so far as WWW be concerned). In your post “Spotlight and Projection Master” you were fighting with something of that sort too. Because all of our questions are related to the same; we both wanna do in Projection Master the same things we do with Polypainting, and we both express surprise when we see that we can’t.

You and the user/Moderator “Support” answered me that it is caused by copyright issues. I have reasons to believe that it is not due to copyright issues, but due to commercial politic of Pixologic. I’m an old engineer and know about what I’m speaking. In a software project there are priorities, schedules, deadlines, etc. You know.

But if some people know how to improve the process of Direct Texture Painting (no Polypainting) with the new tools of ZB 4, his help will be much appreciated. Please, help us in the above referred thread “Spotlight & Texture Painting”.

Thanks to all of you.

(Note: Not an English native person. Still learning. Please, expect some goofs).

#10

The link you provided helped me understand. I agree and have a similar post in the troubleshooting forum. A similar front projection method in Modo does paint directly to a texture. As far as I can tell Zbrush only paints directly to a texture when I use Projection Master, but in Projection Master I can’t seem to get all the great features of Spotlight. I can get it on the screen, but nothing happens.

#11

Yes Spotlight will only polypaint on a 3D mesh in Edit mode. Painting direct to a texture map, or to the 2.5D canvas is not possible.

I’m updating the Image Plane plugin to provide basic manipulation of images within Projection Master (so direct to texture maps or polypaint) as well as a simple ‘modelling from reference images’ set up.

#12

Yes, Nancyan.
Thank you for your participation.

GREAT NEWS
MARCUS IS WORKING AGAIN IN IMAGEPLANE !!!

Thank you, Marcus. ImagePlane is a must-Have in ZBrush.
Many projects require projection painting and polypainting is not an option.
I’m encouraging people to treat this subject in another thread , “Spotlight & Texture Painting”, and I’ll write there the good news.