I find my default materials are by and large unused whenever i sculpt. id like to replace them all with matcaps that I actually like. Id also like for those matcaps to load with zbrush by default.
Im moreso talking about the materials in the bottom rollout and not the matcap rollout, but ill settle…
Does anyone know how to do this?
You can’t change the default materials but you can have custom materials load at startup. Simply put them in the ZStartup/Materials folder. Note though that too many materials loading at startup can cause performance problems (for example the Materials:Load button becomes grayed out).
After working with ZB 3.1 for all this time it’s apparent that most of the default materials (over 100?) are almost never used at all. More than anything I think it’s because of the introduction of MatCap materials.
In ZB 2.x, the PREVIEW mode showed a lot of the old default materials in some rendered form… That changed in ZB 3.x in favor of the MatCap materials which by default, display light, shadow and hilights, quickly and accurately, in PREVIEW mode, while most of the old default materials needed to be BEST rendered to see what they look like - an extra big time demand for most users.
I’d really like to see ZB 4 return to some kind of viable PREVIEW rendering capability for all those materials while maintaining the matcap rendering.
In answer to Mike’s query, a quick and painless way to implement the loading of a complete set of replacement materials would be to setup a new STARTUP DOCUMENT as described >>> HERE <<<.
All you would have to do, Mike, is create a document that DISPLAYS tiny spheres of all of the standard index materials, each slot displaying some replacement CUSTOM MATERIAL that you want as part of your new default set.
At startup, you will have a custom document displaying all the new materials on screen. Control N will clear the screen, but all your custom materials will automatically be available to you.
I think this should work - if you give it a try, report the results here…
Sven
ps - in 2004 I wrote a little script that more or less worked in a similar way… you can find the original thread with the script source
>>> HERE <<< 
Just because YOU don’t use the default materials doesn’t mean that other people don’t.
People who only sculpt will usually only use a MatCap. But people who create ZBrush scenes or paintings really need those additional materials. Because a MatCap has all the lighting and shading information baked into it, that means you can’t change the scene lighting at all. It also means that some MatCaps look totally wrong together because they have the light coming from different directions or at different intensities. If you want to have any control at all over your scene’s lighting, you need to use the regular materials.
The StartupDocument approach works quite well for swapping out the startup materials with something that you personally want. Thank you, Svengali, for mentioning it. 