ZBrushCentral

Material to texture export/import problem

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Here is my problem. I’ve modeled a character and poly painted it. I used a skin matcap and filled the object and on that I used MRGB and RGB paint. The teeth and the eyes for example are the toy plastic material. The rest is RBG paint. I created a new texture, gave it a GUV map and then pressed color to texture button. So far so good. Now if I save that texture under a new name and reimport it, then the material part of the texture is missing. Reselecting the texture that is still within ZBrush then evrything is fine again. I must assume that with the export operation I made some sort of mistake, since the material part is gone. Also what I’ve noticed is that then my model is suddenly without filled material.It is as if I’ve never assigned it a base material. Why is this?

Thnaks for your help.

#2

Materials can’t export. They’re instructions to the rendering engine, and as such they are unique to each renderer.

#3

But I reimported them into Zbrush, which should understand them I would think.

#4

An exported texture is going to be in the PSD or BMP format. Neither of these formats would know a ZBrush material if it bit them. :slight_smile:

IF you have embedded materials in your model (by having Draw>M or Draw>Mrgb turned on when you pressed Color>Fill Object) and IF you tell ZBrush to export the material channel when you export your texture as a PSD, then ZBrush will save an alpha channel in the PSD file that has index values for each material. What this means is that when you load the texture back into ZBrush, ZBrush will know which material NUMBER to associate with each pixel of the texture. So if part of the texture had a material occupying slot 25 painted onto it, then ZBrush will apply the material from slot 25 onto the texture again after importing. But if you have since changed the material that is in slot 25, what you’ll get is the new material; not the old one. All that can be written into the alpha channel is the material slot numbers. There’s no way for the channel to hold all the material settings.

#5

Well now I’ve understood. Thanks Aurick for your in depth answer.

#6

caustic,

If you are saying that an EXPORTED texture map embedded with materials (index info) doesn’t maintain that material-index info when it is re-imported… I’m pretty sure you are right, at least in my experience…

Matt, have you actually tried this? And been able to re-import default materials (index numbers) embedded in an EXPORTED texture map…?

Sven

edit - if the texture map with the embedded materials is exported WITH the tool (by answering Yes to popup box), then when you reimport the tool, the map comes back WITH the embedded materials. I think that’s how the separately saved texture map with embedded materials is also SUPPOSED to work, but it doesn’t appear to.

#7

Thanks Svengali,

You’re right – it should work if you simply export the texture. You do get the pop-up asking if you’d like to include the material channel, but that channel does not appear to be saved. But if you export the tool and the texture, then the material channel also exports.