ZBrushCentral

painting on textures

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

This has been stumping me for a while.

Has anyone good a good reliable workflow for adjusting/painting on a standard texture that’s applied to a model? In my field (games) you often need to work on a texture applied to a relatively low polygon mesh. It’s not that helpful to try and apply it as a polypaint because a) subdividing often doesn’t give as high a resolution as it needs (you’re working on, say, a 2048 by 2048 texture on a polypainted model up to 5 million - bits will look very pixolated once its extracted) and b) More importantly the game needs to see the low poly model as the shape it is when at level one - not the smoothed shape it becomes when subdivided. So lines that I paint as a curve will, for example, suddenly become odd.

I’ve ended up avoiding doing games model textures in zbrush more and more and doing most of my touching up work in 3dcoat which supports this feature fully as pixel painting. Has anyone managed to get this working decently in zbrush? Or is the push towards standard zbrush polypainting kind of blocking this workflow?

#2

The only way your first point would be an issue is if the polygons have huge size differences between them. Even there, it’s not a big deal because you can just divide another time. That brings it up to equivalent to a 4K texture. The parts that need the extra polygons should have them (unless the poly size differential was extreme) and you still just paint what you want to see.

As for the second point, turn off Tool>Geometry>Smt before you divide. This tells ZBrush to add resolution without smoothing the surfaces.

The only other option than converting the texture to polypaint would be to use Projection Master.

#3

Cheers - I’ve found that a lot of the textures, even at relatively good resolution seem to lose just a ‘bit’ of resolution - nothing huge but definitely enough to make painting the fine details something I (and everyone else here at my company) want to stick with the texture for. The suggestion of keeping it unsmoothed as a base was a good un though and I’ll definitely try that.

Projection painting… sadly I tried this a lot and often seemed to bring artifacts in with it - not sure why and very annoying so I abandoned it as a lost cause.