If I have a head or something and I make the lips a different material to the rest of the skin is there some way of saving that so when I come to load it again at a later date all the different areas of the head are the right material?
turnip
If you save it off as a tool and texture is on, you will be asked during saving if you want to have your textures saved also. The right time to say something like “yes”! 
Expanding on that answer, the texture will only embed the material index (its slot within the Material palette). It will not embed the material modifiers. So you will also need to save each modified material that the texture references. Later, after you load the model (which will also load the texture saved with it), you will then need to load the same materials back into their slots in the material palette.
thanks, those answers have both enlightened me and confused me more
am I right in saying:
- make your object
- make a texture for the object.
- apply as many different materials to the object as you want.
- save them all
- save the object with the texture imbedded
- restart zbrush
- load all the materials you applied to the object
- load the object
- and then the object will materialise (geddit?! ) with all the materials applied to the right places on the object.
or maybe ive gone down some wierd tangent and got it totally wrong 
turnip
You got it right 
Just make sure that in step 7 you load the materials into the same slots they were in when you saved them (step 4).
cool cool,
I jus been playing around wiv em and i think im pretty sorted now :). I think i may write a ZScript/tut on it because looking in the quicklink there isnt much about it.
turnip
A very easy way to reload the materials is to first load and draw the model. It will draw with the unmodified materials, and should be very easy to spot which need loading! (For example, if you have textured a head and have a special material for the lips, you will see that they don’t look quite right.)
Now, click on the large material thumbnail in the Material palette and drag out onto the canvas. Your cursor becomes a Picker. Drag it over your model and release. (In our example, you would release over the lips.) The proper material slot will be selected automatically, and you can easily then load the right material (lips.ZMT) into it.
Cool, huh?
brilliant
humm… I think, when you save you Doc… it saving with any materials included in the project… no?
Ps: Matt… Huh is copyrighted!!!
Saving a document will only save the material modifiers for materials that are currently in use on the canvas. However, this thread is about saving materials with a model – something that can be used in several projects. As I previously stated, embedding materials within the texture only stores the material’s index. It does not store the modifiers. And since the model/texture is saved separately from the document, it is necessary to save the materials as well.
However, say you forgot to save one or more of your materials when you saved your models…
As Fouad notes, if you save the ZBrush document as well, then you can ‘re-capture’ the material by opening the document and using the techniques mentioned above. (Do the material selection trick by dragging from the CURRENT MATERIAL swatch out to specific areas of your scene.)
Then you can save the material, open a new document, load your tool and draw it, use the material selection trick to select a specific material slot that was used on the tool, and then load the material you just saved to disk in the slot that is selected.