ZBrushCentral

TextureMaster Revision G: A 3D texturing ZScript and tutorials (Updated May 7th 2003)

Hi Pixolator,

I´ve tested your script. Then I was playing around a little bit with this…

That´s GREAT !!! Thank you so much for writing it :+1: :+1: :+1:
:+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

Kerstin :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

WoW! If this script isn’t the holy grail I don’t know what is. Zbrush is already on steroids and the fact that you can then program it to extend it’s capabilities beyond that is revolutionary. Aside from making texturing a snap that sure is a cool ColorPicker Interface as an added bonus.

My profound thanks Pixolator on all the work that went into this.

Well I’ve set a day aside to play with this brilliant script, and take it through it’s paces … and beta test the heck out of it!

  1. Pix, could you please spell out the terminology behind “Drop” and “Pick”? Is the object being Dropped to the canvas like it has been converted to a 2d flat plane, and the 3d object disapears while you paint on the canvas? When finished you then Pick it up off the canvas - like in 3D copy?

  2. I’ve been repeatingly going over Chapter two, and I really feel the end of Chapter One should make more referance to “3D-Copy”, with examples, (or at least a referance to the 3D copy Primer Script). This is the principle idea behind the Texture Master script isn’t it? This would be very confusing for a newbie who doesn’t have 3D Copying experience.

  3. A texture is basically a bitmap, right? Wouldn’t it be clearer to say “a Bitmap has been applied to the object” (chapt 2). I only say this as most of today’s 3D terminology refer to textures as either bitmaps or materials.

  4. Chapter 4: The Painting Flat color on a droped object and really threw me. I’d like to know more about this and what’s going on?!

5 What is “ATC”? (beside F&B).

  1. What’s the two color selector pannels for? I can only get a brown color saturation. Is it for storing colors??

And to be even more annoying … a wish list!

A): How about a UV group selector/hider? This would be handy for selecting and hiding parts of the model that require a seperate Bitmap such as a head, hair or clothes. and you could work on each part of the model seperatly, with more detail.

B): I’d love to be able to use the expoted materials in other applications. Any chance the saved MTL file could be converted to Studio Max or Lightwave? Maybe even an Alpha mask the same size & shape as the texture-bitmap showing the areas each material has been painted onto (understand?) A material map - much like the alpha map which can be exported and used to mask the placement of materials.

C): Pushing my luck now … A UV maker … You can import a DFX model into ZBrush and assign the UV groups in there. (wishful thinking, but it never hurts to ask)

Any way … I’ll post some examples of my experimenting later. Thanks again for making this excelent Script Pix!! This should make you some serious $$$ !!

Pix-You-later, Pixolator!
Upham :slight_smile:

Hey Upham.

I know that I can answer a few of your questions, at any rate, freeing up a bit more of Pixolator’s time.

  1. Exactly what you said. “Drop” drops it to the canvas in a way that lets you use other tools to paint with. “Pick” picks it back up again and applies the colors/materials that you just painted. “Pick Shaded” does the same thing, but also applies the lighting info.

  2. Yeah, that terminology thing is getting to be crazy to keep track of. A texture can be a bitmap, but depending on the program it can also be a PSD, JPG, PNG, TIFF, and a whole alphabet soup of other extensions. The bottom line is that a texture is any raster image that is applied to the surface of an object via its UV coordinates. A material, on the other hand, controls how light is treated by the object. Other high end programs often call these materials “shaders”. Material properties also show through textures. To see what I mean, take a sphere, wrap one of the textures around it, and then change the material to NoisePattern5. The texture almost gets overpowered by the material. Increase the noise radius, and you’ll see the material interacting with the texture. Poser uses really only one material, with a few changes that can be made to it (such as color, diffusion, and reflectivity), but also puts the texture selector into the same panel. So various programs have different names for the same thing, and it all gets confusing. In ZBrush, though, a texture is any PSD or BMP that can be loaded into the Texture palette, and a material is anything from the Material palette. All objects have a material at the very least (there’s no such thing in ZBrush as an object without a material), and TextureMaster makes it easy to also create a custom texture.

  3. You would only use this trick if you planned to “Pick Shaded” when you next pick the object back up. “Pick Shaded” picks up the new color information, including lighting effects like shadows. This can do nasty things to texture color that you’ve already created for the object. Since the Flat Color material is unaffected by lighting in the scene, painting what you already have with only the material (leaving color alone) has the effect of making the existing texture impervious to the shading. To simplify the decision, look at it this way: If you are going to paint with 2D brushes, don’t worry about this step and use “Pick”. If you plan to use 3D tools or brushes, then in order to get them to look right they will have to have shadows. So you would paint on the Flat Color material to protect what you already have from these shadows, and you would use “Pick Shaded”.

  4. Auto Texture Clone. Have you ever wrapped a texture onto an object, started painting on the object in edit mode, and then decided you didn’t like what you just did – only to discover that UNDO doesn’t work? Textures can be added to in edit mode, but not subtracted from. This feature helps protect you from that by automatically creating a copy of the texture before painting over it. Then you can go back to the old one if you don’t like the new one. Of course, this keeps adding more slots to your Texture palette, and eating up more RAM as the system has to store each additional texture in memory. But if you are doing something that you’re not sure you’ll like, this will protect you. And you can always delete textures that you no longer need from memory. Default for this feature is “off”.

For your wishes, there are a few things you can do.

A) I recently hit upon the trick of making a black and white copy of the texture with anything that I don’t want to work on in white and everything else in black. I load this into the Alpha palette and apply it to the object as a mask (Tool>Modifiers>Selection>Alp). I then click the HidePt button, and everything that was white in the alpha immediately disappears. It’s still there, but it’s hidden so that you can’t accidentally paint on it or even see it. You can then later Show Points again to get the hidden areas back. I now use that trick if I’m messing with an imported Poser head. Those eyelashes really suck without a transparency applied, so I just hide them using this trick and forget about them. When I’m ready to add eyelashes, I use the fiber brush. What’s great about this compared to normal masking (where you paint the mask on) is that it applies exactly according to the UV map, which means that it applies to each facet of the OBJ perfectly, with no spillover into areas that you want to keep.

B) It’s not as easy, but remember that when you export your OBJ at the end of the process, ZBrush is saving two things: The obj (with its UV coordinates), and the bitmapped texture. You can also save the texture, yourself, if you don’t want to export the obj (let’s say you are making a texture for Michael’s shirt – why bother reimporting the shirt into Poser when you can just apply a new texture to it?). Either way, it’s pretty easy to take the texture into Photoshop or its competetion and quickly use the selection tools to grab the area that you want to use the material on (remember – materials are lighting effects, so they have a uniform color on the texture and are therefore very easy to select on most textures; take a look at the rhino’s saddle to see what I mean). Change it white. Invert your selection and fill with black. Now you have a mask where the only white area is the material in question, ready for use in Max or Lightwave. It usually only takes a minute.

Whew! That’s a lot of stuff, but I hope that it answers most of the questions pretty well. Turns out that there were only a couple that someone wiser and more knowledgeable will have to tackle. :slight_smile:

Cheers!

:+1: Very very very impressive :+1:

jd

First of all a big thanks, Pixolator, to you and all the team. :slight_smile:

I have been out for a short time…involved in my game art stuff… You told us in a game-low-pol post about the creation of a script for 3d copy. And it is here! Thanks a zillion. Best support ever seen. :slight_smile:

I have downoladed it, I am saving the 3 post pages, I will read all (and tuts) now quietly and start working with it.

Great :slight_smile:

Sure if I do something nice I’ll be posting a small screenshot here.

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Don’t read it, Pixolator, u must be really tired and you deserve good rest and relax…I mean, i’d feel terribly bad if u loose time on this words. They’re just congratulations, and congratulations, and congratulations, …and some tips for Upham and maybe someone more about new color pickers.

wow. I have read/watch the 5 incredible good tuts you’ve made…No a single brain effort i have needed, so …great tut! :wink:

Perhaps I have the advantage of using widely 3d copy before…Well, I have made a first quick test with a simple sphere…Great!. It was that what was needed. Exactly that. A simple keystroke (G) to toggle. And the whole operation in much less than a second. One does not loose the painting flow.

Some have said something bout expensive Deep Paint…it not only makes you don’t need that package.There’s also the great advantage…you can model while you paint. (read the tut, it’s really easy)

Thank you very much pixolator. My low poligon count stuff is gonna be really easy now. And also high pol, cause I needed also for it.

About what Uphan says of using color selectors (hey, it comes with the pack, a color selector! :smiley: ) I understood the vertical one is easy, …and…wait…while I’m writting I have seen how it is all used,

look Uphan:

The vertical. Easy, just put the cursor whereever in the image. Pres c in your keyboard. Then u’ll have that color in the first cell of tha vertical color selector. Do it again and the new color puts in that first one. The one u selected before goes bellow. This way u always have the last 4 selected colours…This is really important improvement.

second selector. Is the one horizontal. Easy.You click on the upper BIG grey button, and it takes the color which is selected at that moment on vertical selector.(the one in first cell) .

If u click on the lower BIG grey button,(both have an arrow drawn) then you’ll have selecetd a second color, setting there the color whic also is selected in vertical selector, at that moment.

Why is this so? Seems that it is a nice way to create a gamma, a palette with tones between those two colors.

Imagine want to paint tree leaves. Well, you’ll probably use a dark green and a yellow green, and make this kind of palette-gradient, so that you’ll have that cool gradient color to take those inbetween color. Knowing that each color is exactly the same. I mean: Imagine u want a clear almost yellow green for leaves nerves.You may always wish that exact color. Well…you’ll have it there…As many other escat colors. U pick colors in a rather comfortable way than the old picker. Also is a “dinamic” palette. U’ll be constructing it an changing it as u continue in your work.

It would cool even if found in a 2d package. not many have it.

I was also looking for something of this.

So, Pixolator, once again…Chapeau!
(if it is written so :wink: )

Upham, yes it is that drop goes to canvas mode, pick back to edit. But it also set it up everything for you. My prob was often I loose work, but most of all, I did loose the painting “idea” now u paint and rotate, in a way which finally is productive and absolutely useful. :slight_smile:

I think I’ve never told u , but I also liked some old tuts from u, Upham.

I just saw TextureMaster tutorials and I am
totaly impresed !!!

I use to work with max and maya before but this feature is exceptional and fantastic.

Well done :smiley:

What can one say? I’m absolutely amazed. Five days away from the net-- what a great suprise to find this!!! :slight_smile:
Thank you so much for all the effort you must have put into this. (Time to go wonder how you did the animations!!!) :+1:
Grinning like a madman! :slight_smile:

Hi,
Those who are encountering difficulties in loading this ZScript should read this thread.
-Zuzu :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Thank you (again) for your kind comments and information :slight_smile:

TextureMaster has been updated in order to fix a minor problem when using the “PickUp” button on a large-zoomed out canvas.

:large_orange_diamond: If you have encountered this problem then you should download the updated version (revision E at the top of this thread).

:large_orange_diamond: If you have not encountered this problem (i.e. not using large canvas in zoomed-out mode), you can wait for next update :slight_smile:

-Pixolator

What a great tool. I’m blown away after viewing the tutorial scripts! I did notice one small thing. When using an obj file that I made using 3d Explorer, when I pressed the drop button it turned the smoothing automatically to 1.0, which really deformed the model. Is this the way its suppose to work or is this a small bug?

Thanks
J.B. Settle

Hi J.B. Settle :slight_smile:
For simplicity sake (less steps to remember) TextureMaster will automatically increase the SMOOTH value from zero to one because it is the most common texturing mode. You can, however, turn this automatic behavior by pre-setting SMOOTH to any value (other than zero), and TM will not modify it. i.e. set SMOOTH to 0.0001 and it will stay 0.0001
Hope this helps :slight_smile:
-Pixolator

I know that I am using a bastard version because I cannot import with the trial. I have downloaded the zscript on several ocasions and have yet to get it to work. I have a pentium 3 1000, 768m ram etc.something is wrong someplace, I get the other scripts to work without any problems, but unfortunately not the textureMaster. HELP PIX.

Thanks Pixolator that worked like a charm. I had set the Smooth option to zero when experimenting with different ways to get the object to appear correctly. Great product, I look forward to learning all of its amazing features.

J.B. Settle

When I load your script, all that happens is that the text of the script displays on the bottom. Yes, run is enabled. I believe that I have the 1.23a version. Do I need 1.23b to use some scripts?

You should definitely upgrade to 1.23b!

Part of the interface for the script menu involves a gear, which is only available with the newer version.

Besides, 1.23b has two other very useful new tools in it, and a few other changes from 1.23a. Since the upgrade is free, there’s nothing but a little download time to keep you from getting it. Well worth it, believe me!

Texturemaster rocks, the tutorials are great, but I haven’t much of a memory.

Is there a way to create a printable version of the tutorials?

I really need a hardcopy to look at while I do things, otherwise I may as well be trying to remember a dream.

2-6

I can’t get it to work in windows 2000 , but it works fine in windows 98 , anyone the same problem ?

Hi Namek,

Please read this thread:

TextureMaster Help

-ZuZu :slight_smile: