You can’t use transparency in “best” render mode. You may be making the same mistake I made when first learning Zbrush by thinking “best” render is actually the best renderer in Zbrush. The render modes are very confusingly named, To me, “best” render would be the best renderer available, and “best preview render” would be a quick renderer to kind of see what your render will look like in a general sense. BPR is by far the best renderer in Zbrush. The only things I’ve found that are missing from bpr vs best is fog and depth que, both of which can be simulated in real time with the bpr filter. I can’t really think of a reason to use “best” render at all any more.
Ahh! thanks for that.
I have quite a few materials which use bump maps. BPR can’t render these correctly at all so I’d be very sad indeed if I lost my ability to use them. They’re the best of the best so far as nice looking materials are concerned IMHO.
Try this; Do a best render with the bump mat on your mesh. Then immediately do a bpr render. You may be surprised with the results.
That is exactly what I always do. Best of both worlds really. 
does anyone know why my spotlight doesnt seem to open? i tried everything from opening textures in lightbox, pressing Z, ctrl+Z, editing some preferences but still it doesnt come up.
I am starting to think i may have screwed up during the update, what should i do?
thanks!
Yup. It works well for bump mats, but don’t try to make fog or blur work that way. You’ll just get a black screen lol.
- In the Texture palette (the main palette selected from the menu titles at the top of the UI) select a texture.
- Press the ‘Add to Spotlight’ button. This is the square button with a dial and up and down arrows on the right and immediately above the ‘Invers’ button in the Texture palette.
That’s it.
On the Spotlight issue…
Also try adding a folder in the ZBrush 4R3 Root folders, name it ZSpotlights, I’m using Windows XP, so I don’t know if that matters. First time I did this I screwed up and left the s off and it didn’t work. What this will do is make the Lightbox> Spotlight button work, you can now save your Spotlight canvases there for future use.
Anyone having problems toggling Spotlight “On” and “Off” with the “z” hotkey?
I can not toggle the Spotlight UI back on after toggling it off (using the “z” hotkey). I can load images into Spotlight but once I press “z” to toggle the spotlight UI off, it won’t toggle back on by hitting “z” again. I have to go through a process of adding a texture back into Spotlight (even if it’s a duplicate) just to toggle the Spotlight UI back on.
Here are my system specs:
Window 7 64bit ***8226; i7 980 @ 4.3 Ghz ***8226; 24 Gigs of RAM ***8226; ZBrush 4R3
EDIT:
Shift Z works, so I can show and hide images but the UI I can’t bring back.
EDITEDIT:
Initialized ZBrushed and it fixed this. Hmmmmm…
Nothing to see here, move along! 
I did at first. Somehow my Z hotkey got reassigned to Z-Intensity without my knowledge. All I had to do was reassign it to the Edit Spotlight button, which is found in the Transform menu for some strange reason, and all was good with the world once more. 
Sounds like you’re doing your saving manually. Have you tried the hotkey for saving? Ctrl/Cmd Shift T, rename and hit your enter key.
Hi All,
I’m missing the Make 3D button in the layers pallette. Is there a new location for the button, or is there a new workflow for extracting meshes from layers.? I’ve had
success with mesh extraction in the subtools pallete, but am curious how to extract geo from layers
Cheers,
Andrew
test
There’s similar functionality in the Morph Target Subpalette. Turn off the layer, store an MT, turn the layer on, then Tools: Morph Target: CreateDiff Mesh
Thanks Cryrid! I’ll give it a go
A
Hi folks, brand new to the forum here so if this topic has been covered elsewhere, please go easy (I did search for it first in FAQ, but came up empty). I’ve just upgraded to 4R3, and am using a Mac Pro 2x2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel w/ 32 GB RAM & OSX Lion 10.7.3. The trouble I am having is with loading or saving brush curves (*.zcv files); any *.zcv file I try to load is greyed out, and if I try to save a brush curve I get the following error message “Error has been encountered while trying to save a ZSCurve. Saving has been aborted”.
This happens constantly, even after I’ve hit “Init Z Brush”, or have restored the standard UI to try and start w/ the original clean configuration. The steps I’ve followed are: 1) Open Zbrush 2) Hit “Init ZBrush” in Prefs 3) load default sphere 4) open brush palette and re-set brushes 5) Brushes> Curves> Load or Save curve.
Any help you can give would be very much appreciated!
Hello there, I’m very new to ZBrush so I’m sorry if this seems a fairly obvious problem (I have the feeling it might be), but I’ve just started playing around with ZBrush and I’m trying to export a UV map from a polypaint, but it’s not working.
Attached is a screencap of what my uv map looks like in the interface.
I started with making a texture map and then choosing “uv map from polypaint”; however I found that on trying to do this a second time and re-opening my model, I can’t seem to change the subdivision level which might have something to do with this? (The slider for the subdivisions are grayed out and frozen)
I’m running Windows 7 64-bit, with i5 CPU and 6 GB RAM; let me know if I need to provide more information or other screenshots, and thanks!
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