ZBrushCentral

masks, stencils, displacements differences and opinions

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

OK. got a question. tried a test today of applying an image as a displacement, as a mask then using inflate, and finally as a stencil and painting through it. i painted each on a plane at a high resolution. each one had a different effect and the smoothest by a long shot was the displacement option under tools/ displacement.

the mask seems to respond to the size of the texture which was set at 2048 for all of this. would it make a difference if the texture was a different size than the image file (actual size is 1131x1384, it is a digital elevation map converted from .raw to 16 bit psd. couldn’t get a 16 bit tiff to import in)? why would this matter less in the displacement?

the stencil wasn’t used at actual size either. it was set to fit vertical. which was maybe 70% of its actual size.

does zbrush view a stencil or a mask with a different resolution than the image is?

why would a displacement come out smoother than either of the others. does this mean that a displacement is less dependent on the resolution of the surface?

i noticed a thread where dave cardwell says he applies wrinkles as a mask and inflates around them.

what could guide the decision to either use the stencil or mask or apply displacement?

any thoughts would be very useful. i have been over all the quicklinks that struck me as relevant and have learned alot but my experiments have brought some questions up so i apologize if this has been answered in depth in another thread. . thanks!:smiley:

r

#2

Ok here is what I guess on this. Pixologic guys correct me please if Im wrong.

Textures in the Texture menu are 8bit. ( I cant import 16bit as well. But I should be able to )

Alphas can be 16 or 8 but when they are used in edit mode for sculpting only
8 bits are used. Thats when you will see stair stepping/noise in the deformtion.( or maybe the brush itself not moving points at float precision, dont know )

When you use Projection Master floating point info is painted but displayed in 16 bit color ( which is cool ).

Basicly I get best results using projection master for the very fine details.
Thats what I ment in the post that you refer to. Another item that is very very important when creating your fine details is the resolution of the canvas itself.
If your canvas is at 512x512 and you import and project a 2k texture the
resulting map with be softer then if you would have projected through a 2k canvas.

Dave

#3

Dave - thank you much for that! that answers alot of questions and makes sense. jives with the results i was getting. it struck me as odd that i lost my 16bit info as a stencil but so it goes.

thanks again for the reply! and thanks for your work. very inspirational. perhaps we’ll see you in LA sometime.

ryan