Am I missing something?
I have multiple sub objects. I can paint (M) material , multiple materials if they come in the defualt zbrush material menu.
If I have a custom material that i saved i have to open them. The PROBLEM is that zbrush only allows me to open 1 material at a time.
so every time i opan a new material from my collection it automaticaly applies it to every sub tool.
how can I make zbrush allow me to load more then 1 or two materials into the pallet? i think that would solve it.
my models dont save with material painted also. 
are you using 1.55, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.5, 4?
Anyway…4 being the newest version, we’ll assume that.
You have to paint the material onto the mesh to actually apply it.
(M) cool>fill object (RGB 100).
Zbrush 4 saves projects now, which include all used materials.
I suppose is the same as in 3.5…
1.-Base material and color with MRGB on and in Color Palette>fill object, then
2.-Select subtool AND choose the material for each subtool with MRGB on press Fill Object and so on
3.-I dont have ZB4 so i cant test right now
hope this help
ps: i dont remember the link for a video tut of this issue but i will search my database of Zb previous version to see if i can post here:D
Use SubTool Master (available from the Download Center) to fill the visible subtools with material. You can select different materials for different subtools so long as each is filled. Once a subtool is filled with material it won’t change every time you change materials in the Material palette.
If you are loading a custom material make sure you select an unused material first, as the loaded material will replace the selected material.
Save your work as a Project and custom materials will be saved too so you won’t need to reload them.
thanks for taking the time to help me out everyone.
Marcus- Thank you very much. you were right. I wasnt selecting new material before loading a material.:o DOH!
A little trick I’ve found is to go to the ZStartrup/Materials folder and copy & paste one of the Matcaps several times and label the copies BlankMateral1. BlankMaterial2 etc.
Then when you are in ZBrush you can copy a default material, paste it into one of your BlankMaterials and adjust that one instead (leaving your defaults untouched). You can also load up custom Materials into these BlankMaterials.
This way when you save out your project and load it up again the new material settings wont overwrite any of the defaults.
Im having a similar issue I have my subtool selected , mrgb is turned on i go to select a different material color>fill object and it does nothing.
I also tried to do this in subtool master and it also does not work, strangely enough if i run the “fill>material” command on all my subttols it updates onyl some to the new mterial and not others…
Any ideas? seems this one particular subtool does not want to receive the new material
When that weirdness happens I usually hide all subtools but the one that is being stubborn, clone the one that is having issues by hitting clone, save it out as a ztl, then restart zbrush, which is just superstition, but it’s best to start from a clean reboot of the app sometimes when you encounter weirdness so I do it.
Then I go and reboot zbrush, and before I do anything I select white color and basic material and make sure MRGB is set to 100. Then I load the ztl I just made.
Then before I draw it out on the canvas I go to Polypaint menu and make sure that Colorize is unchecked, and that no texture is activated or that no masking is applied that I can’t see, or anything.
Then I draw it out, and go into edit mode. Then I switch to an unused material, usually Basic Material 2, and go and load the material I want my mesh to be.
It’s then that I hit Color/Fill Object. Once that’s done I save the ztl again. Now I go out of edit mode, and clear the canvas by hitting Ctrl+N. Then I select something like the Polymesh 3d tool and then load my main subtool where the problem all started. Once I have that subtool selected, I delete the old version of the weird subtool and append the good one I just made.
This usually does the job. It’s weird, annoying etc…but it does happen sometime. I had one tool that would not change from the material no matter what I did, I seem to have baked it into the mesh somehow, and totally broke it’s ability to update to a new mat until I did this.
I think I broke a subtool once like that by using zapplink and baking my matcap into the material, no matter what I did I couldn’t get it to work right after that until I did what I mentioned here.
Thanks Extra,
sadly that did not work for me, But I did find a solution seems that if your subtool has a layer with “record” turn on it wont assign the new material as soon as i baked my layer it started to accept the new mat.
So bake all your layers first and that should work 
That’s good to know, I’m sure I’ll run into that at some point.