Hi.
Is there a way to isolate the effect of a texture to a single subtool? When I apply the texture for a subtool, it becomes applied to the whole model.
Thanks!
~S.~
Unfortunately, Zbrush currently only supports one active texture at a time per tool, and it applies globally.
The good news is, this appears to be changing with the new release in a few days:
If you’re rendering outside of Zbrush, this is mostly a cosmetic inconvenience, as you can preview the texture for the subtool you want in ZB, one at a time, then apply them all outside of ZB in your external renderer.
In the meantime though, until the update, if you’re trying to render in Zbrush with multiple textures, you can render one tool at a time…hide all but the subtool you want to render, Shift -S to snapshot, render that, then move on to the next subtool and repeat.
Thanks, Bingo! ~T.~
SNARK, you can convert texture to polypaint on your SubTool. Repeat with the textures for each of your other SubTools. When done, the whole model will be colored correctly.
Thanks, Aurick.
I finally did come around to that, though it means higher polycounts on the individual subtools than if I could wrap a texture around something more LoPoly.
Love the program. Love the support.
~S.~
Yes, it does mean higher counts per SubTool, but it also opens the door for some important advantages. You see, when you’re painting directly on the texture – what happens if you need to change the UV’s? What happens if you decide you’d like a higher resolution? Either way, you have to redo everything you’ve already painted.
When working with PolyPaint, you can save the UV mapping and texture size for last. If you need to change either, it has no effect on what you’ve already done. That goes far to avoid lost time. And avoiding the need to live with a problem because fixing it would lose too much of what you’ve already done. 
All very good points and thank you, Sensei, for taking the time to point them out to me.
~S.~