ZBrushCentral

Tileable textures, seam nightmares.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi everyone.

I’m currently going through the video tutorial by Andy Davies at Eat 3D for creating tileable textures in Zbrush. Using Zbrush 4.
Creating Tileable Textures in ZBrush

I’m currently following the tutorial from about 4.50 onwards.

I’ve applied my seamless displacement map to the 4mil poly mesh, dropped it to the canvas and scrolled it a little using the ‘@’ key and… I see the seams in the attached screenshot. I’ve also grabbed a normal map from the same tool using the grabdoc and the seams appear there too…
seams.jpg

I cannot seem to get rid of them no matter what, it appears to have something to do with how Zbrush is grabbing the depth map from the display.

My question is:

Am I doing something wrong, is there some arcane setting that I need turned on that’s not discussed in the video?

Is the seam there for Andy too and I just can’t see it cos of the video quality?

I’m an environment artist for a games dev but a bit of a noob to ZBrush so I’m trying out some new techniques that could work really well but unless these seams get ironed out I can’t imagine it working too well.

Cheers guys, appreciate any help.

#2

heh heh. The horror the horror. Cute!:lol:

Marcus has a nice plug in for this:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?p=848321#post848321

about 1/2 way down the page.

#3

OK, I tried the plugin and saved out a normal map (using the al_normal_map), and it does look better than before because the 4 pixel wide black bar at the top has gone but… look who’s still there:

seams2.jpg

If no one else has ever noticed this problem I’m guessing it must be an PBBAK (Problem Between Brain and Keyboard) what am I likely to be doing wrong?

Ta.

#4

Originally posted by Nancyan

about 1/2 way down the page.
Hi Nancyan,

I don’t know if your aware of this or not, but you can link directly to the exact post if you want. In the options bar at the top of every post, click on ‘post#’. This will put the post in it’s own window. Then copy and paste the URL of that window.

For example: Seamless Texture plugin

#5

No I didn’t notice that! What a convenience!! Thanks so much Zber2 :slight_smile:

And VinegarStrokes, I’m sorry I can’t help you further, but hopefully someone else will. In the meantime I’m enjoying the cartoons!!

#6

I did a search and found something that I don’t completely understand, but may help. Sorry to the author of this tip, I accidently closed out the screen before I grabbed the name.

Before you screen grab, try going into the Render menu and turn off Shadows and do a “Best” render.

I hope this helps, it’s a real shot in the dark, but what the heck!

#7

The Seamless Texture plugin will output a good map (with or without Best render) if all looks good when you scroll using the ~ key but it can’t get rid of lines already there. They are because the displacement map already has them.

#8

Ok, thanks. I’m thinking maybe because I’m using a 16bit grayscale texture that maybe my eyes can’t perceive some levels of gray that ZBrush obviously can. i shall investigate further.

#9

Hmmmm. Further investigation reveals some buggy stuff going on.

I ended up with a perfectly tileable tool, I drew it on, hit edit, framed it, dropped it back to the canvas and @ed that sucker. Joy of joys, no weird seams.

Then I restarted Zbrush, did exactly the same thing and they were BACK, like stink on poop.

Turns out that the seams appear differently every time. It appears to be tied to how much I’m zoomed in on the canvas when I’m drawing and framing the tool. Zoom out so the canvas is small when you frame the tool and they don’t appear.

This must be a crazy display bug in Zbrush, the problem is that if I do a grabdoc while the seams are present they’ll be included in the image, which is why they were showing up in my normal map. Being a 3D guy through and through I find ZBrushes 2.5d nature a bit hard to grasp but does this sound likely?

#10

The issue may be to do with how ZBrush frames a 3D object to fit the canvas - it’s not a very reliable way of sizing.

I only had a quick look at that tutorial (and I’ve not looked at it all) but I couldn’t understand why he did some things. For example, if you’ve made your alpha tileable in PS, and it’s the same size as you want your ZBrush canvas to be you can create a tileable background by:

  1. Importing the alpha into the alpha palette.
  2. Pressing Alpha>Crop And Fill.

Also, using the MRGZGrabber tool is quite likely to give you lines in your tileable alpha/texture. That’s why I wrote the plugin.

#11

Yeah, your plugin will be what I use for the normals etc because it works well, it’s only that it doesn’t give you a depth map to use as a displacement that I didn’t use it before.

Thanks for all the help.

#12

Doh! My mistake, it does! I take back everything I said and pronounce you king of all plugins, saviour of environment artists everywhere. (well, me at least). :smiley:

#13

Thanks. :slight_smile: I guess you found the alpha in the Alpha palette. :wink: