ZBrushCentral

Some kind of effect that shows a grey-scale view of my sculp???

ZScripting Help
#1

Hello and thanks for your time,

I am working on a sculpt on a planar surface that is more of relief sculpt than a full 3D sculpted model.
I was wondering if there is some tool, or effect, or plugin that allows me to see the topological differenes in my heights and lows. Sort of like a colored gradient tool where say black would represent the 0 base-line, the highest ares of the relief sculp is white and everyting in between is in grey-tones. I guess exactly like a bump map!:smiley: But as I sculpt, the colored gradient adapts in real-time.

Basically some kind of tool to help he show how high and low I am sculpting .

K

#2

Try the bump viewer material.

#3

Well, I was about to answer that there wasn’t a way but then I thought of something and it actually works rather well. :wink: It will need a little setting up but I shall explain how it works and then you’ll be able to experiment.

This uses surface noise to color the mesh with a gradient. I’ve included the noisemaker file in the zip. There’s also a plane ZTL that you can load into ZBrush to see how it works. The ZTL has the noise included so you shouldn’t need to load separately.

  1. Unzip the zip file.
  2. In ZBrush, press the Tool>Load Tool button and load the Height-Plane.ZTL from the zip.
  3. If necessary, draw on the canvas and press T to enter Edit mode. Select a white material such as SkinShade4 so you can clearly see the gradient.
  4. In the Tool palette, open the Geometry>Position section.
  5. Experiment with adjusting the Z Position slider. You’ll see that the gradient changes. You can adjust this slider to get the gradient where you want on the model. You can easily set it back to zero when you’ve finished.
  6. Open the Tool>Surface sub-palette and press the Edit button. The Noisemaker interface will appear.
  7. Experiment with the Scale slider. You’ll see that the range of Z depth can be varied.
  8. To load the Noisemaker file for a different model you would press the Open button and select the HeightMap.ZNM file included in the zip.

Download here:

If you put the HeightMap.ZNM file in your ZBrush 4R6/ZNoiseMakers folder then you’ll be able to quickly load it through the Lightbox>Noise tab.

Attachments

Noise.jpg

Plane.jpg

#4

If you wanted to work with just the levels of gray while sculpting you could turn on Render>Flat.

#5

this looks awesome Marcus. I’ll give it run soon and I’ll let you know how it turns out! Lemon

#6

How did you make the Noise Height map ZMN file? Or was it a Zbrush default file anyone can use?Thanks! :smiley:

#7

It’s the Gradient option for the NoiseMaker NoisePlug. Take a look like this:

  1. Load the ZTL or ZNM file I posted.
  2. Press Tool>Surface>Edit. The NoiseMaker interface will appear.
  3. On the NoiseMaker interface, press the Edit button to the right of the NoisePlug switch. The NoisePlug interface will appear.
  4. You’ll see that the Gradient option is selected. All I did was set the ‘Directions’ to Z only and adjust the scale.

If you have the plane ZTL loaded and change the ‘Directions’ to Y, you’ll see that the gradient is repeated in stripes across the plane. Adjusting the Scale setting will make the stripes larger or smaller. If you go back to the NoiseMaker interface you’ll see that the 3D switch is selected. This means that the noise (in this case gradient) is applied in 3D space and doesn’t take any notice of your model’s shape or UVs.