ZBrushCentral

making Z Brush alphas?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

hello, new to ZBrush. I have a question on how to build a alpha in zbrush?

I am using the UT3 game engine to build scenes. so I am making a wall with a 512x512 texture. one issue with doing tilable textures is that you cant have unique marks on that wall unless you use decals. what i want to be able to do in ZBrush is say get a plane and carve out what would look like wall damage. from there be able to texture it, and pull that normal out of zbrush and get that nice depth information that zbrush gets. one issue though is I dont know how I would go about getting the alpha of that plane in which I carved the damage in.

is there a special button or method that I can make it so I only pick up the damage information and not the image plane information?

#2

Size the canvas to a square. Ideally, it should be the size of the alpha that you want. Draw the plane on the canvas so that it fills the canvas. Make sure that it’s rotated square with the camera. (Hold shift to snap the rotation.) Now exit edit mode and then press Alpha>GrabDoc.

#3

hmm… I tried that and it did pull the alpha, how do I go about getting it to be say 512x512 or 1024x1024? Engine like many things only accepts textures the power of 2.

Also the alpha that it pulls I need it to be a complete black or white map. not just an zbrush style alpha map. something along the lines of this…