ZBrushCentral

Trouble with Alpha around Cylinder

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello, I was wondering if I could get help with this. I am tring to get a snake skin alpha around my sub tool. The issues I am having when using masking or projection master, are scale and seams. I have been using the drag rect with ZInt of 20 and the Alpha has a Radial Focus of 100. What is the best way to approach this? I have searched through ZBCentral and found links to issues with creating seamless alphas but not applying them to a cylinder. I appreciate any help I can get. Thanks

Snake_piece.jpg

Attachments

scale_prob.jpg

Scales_Alpha.jpg

#2

Care to elaborate on what you mean by scale and seams. Your description seems kind of vague and the images are small so it’s hard to tell from them. What are you trying to achieve?

#3

What I was hoping to achieve was a snake skin that would be wrapped around the mesh. The results I am getting now are showing overlapping where the alpha was dragged out and not lining up to its previous placement. In the highlighted image the circle is showing this, but also is evident near the bottom left arrow. Also being that it is a cylinder the alpha tends to enlarge on the sides when going around, hence the scale issue. From where I start ,with the desired size, the snake scales increase in size greatly when i go all the way around.

#4

You have 2 alternatives that will work quite well.

  1. You can turn the Alpha into a Stencil and apply it that way. Click here to learn more if you have never used a Stencil. Turn Radial Focus to 0 though.

  2. You can also do basically the same thing using your Alpha in Spotlight. There is a good Spotlight Tutorial section in ZClassroom if you have never used it before. There is also a quick and easy explanation tutorial on Youtube that you can watch here.

#5

Thanks! Really appreciate it. I will try both methods.

#6

Your welcome SilentKnight. I would try to find a better alpha than the one you posted though. As it is, it isn’t tilable. If you find a nice tilable alpha, then you could use Projection Master to get more precise and even results. Also, it will work much better with the two methods that I mentioned above. Sometimes it’s hard to find the alpha you want. I usually end up making my own.