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Random materials on model when sharing between zbrush installations

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey Everyone-

Quick question concerning materials that’s been bugging me for a long time. Occaisonally I need to bring a model I’ve worked with on my main station to a client to show or work on location on my laptop. I’ve applied materials, and even though I have the exact same materials in the zStartup-Materials folder, they will break and get randomized on the model. What is the cause of this and is there a solution? I have to go in manually and reapply the materials, which is fine if it’s a subtool, but sometimes I have multiple materials painted onto a single geo (like a cork in a bottle for instance, where the cork is extruded and part of the same mesh).

Any help much appreciated on this.
Cheers-
OZ

#2

if you save out a .zbr file of the .ztl that you are working on. Load the .zbr first, then load the .ztl it should work.

The materials get confused, like you said, on a .ztl for some reason, but if you open a .zbr it preloads all of the materials and then applies them correctly to the .ztl.

No clue why this happens, but that’s how I work around it anyway.

#3

goast its because of the way materials occupy slots, heres a one explanation:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=73688&highlight=slots

#4

Hey guys, thanks for the quick response. I searched pretty extensively and wasn’t able to find anything, so this is a great help- I’ll try the .zbr approach. That’s usually how zBrush works, where you have to save things out in separate files and load them in. As they refine the program, this is going away little by little.

Spaceboy- thanks for the link to the page- interesting reading. Aurick mentions using slots for different materials and then being able to swap them out later, but he doesn’t mention how to assign the materials to the particular index slots- any ideas? I’ll search 'round and see if I can find anything on this.

Thanks again!
OZ

#5

Just wanted to follow up- saving the zbr document to restore materials worked like a charm! Thanks Goast and Spaceboy!

#6

happy to help.