ZBrushCentral

Spotlight Nudge Tool - Makes a MESS!?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’m trying out spotlight for texture work, and was most excited about the prospect of using the Nudge tool to quickly adapt source photos to fit my models. However, after attempting to use it I’m finding that all it does is create a very harsh, stretchy shearing effect that ruins the image. From watching the tutorial videos I expected something along the lines of Photoshop’s “liquify”, but instead it behaves like a inferior version of Kai’s Power Goo.

Maybe I’m overlooking something or going about it the wrong way. I’ve tried every combination of intensity, size and focus but can’t get it to do anything useful.

-M

#2

Ok, just watched the tutorial again and caught the part about sub-d levels and smoothing of the image. Helps with the tearing, but still a complete pain to get things the proper shape (like hitting moving target) if you have to keep smoothing it out after nudging. Guess it’s not really that great of a tool.

#3

Hmmm, just restarted Zbrush and Nudge is behaving much more as I would expect. Not sure, but maybe there was something funky set on my brush in the last session. Now there is another issue…

when I use shift nudge to smooth, I get all sorts of weird polygon artifacts as if the image grid is getting corrupted. Not sure if this has something to do with stepping up and down in sub-d levels. Speaking of which, is there any UI indicator of what IMAGE sub-d level you are currently working on?

Thanks,

M

#4

Mitchfx
I’m with you on this. The Spotlight tool is very nifty feature to have to do textures but that ANNOYING issue of stretching the textures and having to redo every little detail to get it right is absurd and very time consuming. Also, another headache is when you paint from different angles using a different photo from the same source creates lighter or darker areas which no matter what you do you end having to redo everything. I hope the creators REALLY take a look at this and come up with a better solution. It takes too much time to have to take the exported texture map out of Zbrush and tweak all the minor details that you thought SPOTLIGHT covered. :confused: