ZBrushCentral

Why masking with a stencil and then extracting would be good

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Instead of grossly and inaccurately dragging an alpha across a tool, imagine precisely positioning an alpha that had fine details in it, after making it a mask and making a stencil, and then being able to extract that into a subtool.

I have a project where I took a screen shot of my tool, put it in illustrator, and then made detailed shapes that I wanted to extract and apply different materials to, via importing the alpha and turning it into a stencil.

I tried using the stencil to paint black on the tool, hoping to go to Mask>Mask by intensity, but that button was grayed out and unavailable. So I am stumped on how to accomplish what seems like a simple idea: put a stencil over a tool and instantly extract subtools. Seems like that should be easy…?

#2

once you have your model polypainted you need to convert it to a texture for the masking intensity button to work.
tool > texture map > new from polypaint
don’t forget to set up your texture size in the uv map menu.
i would think you could set up a macro that would do this and have your extraction settings as well.

#3

Thanks for the tip, I will try that!

#4

Yes, this worked, did the trick, and accomplishes exactly what i want. I spend all day being a noob and you fixed it! Thanks.

#5

sometimes the answer is in the button itself, if you hold CTRL over a button it will usually tell you its function, in the case of mask intensity it says from a applied texture, so its just deductive reasoning from there, i’ve learned quite a bit about the program that way, especially considering they no longer have the great help/tutorials like were in z2.
and the docs page:
http://www.zbrush.info/docs/index.php/Main_Page

#6

Thanks, yeah I do that all the time.