WrapMode issues - cannot avoid getting edge seams

[ryankingslien]

TVEyes - thanks for all this information and the workflow! That is great.

littlelostalien - the problem you are describing could come from sculpting the edges of the 3d plane while you have it tilted. There are a couple of solutions to that.

First, have the plane perpendicular to z axis of the canvas when sculpting the edges.

Second, turn on picker: once ori and use that when sculpting the edges. Keep in mind each brush stores this setting so you have to change it for each brush you use.

I hope this helps.

ryan

[system]

Edit > Littlelostalien > I forgot to mention I also get the same white speckles using my material from below. The solution so far is to turn off Preferences > Performance > MultiRender when rendering normal maps or other documents with materials that create these darned speckles.

Cool, speckles are gone

littlelostalien - the problem you are describing could come from sculpting the edges of the 3d plane while you have it tilted. There are a couple of solutions to that.

First, have the plane perpendicular to z axis of the canvas when sculpting the edges.

Second, turn on picker: once ori and use that when sculpting the edges. Keep in mind each brush stores this setting so you have to change it for each brush you use.

Hmmm… well that works when your brush strokes are on the flat plane… but as soon as you work on top of somewhere you’ve already sculpted then it doesn’t help as it won’t be selecting a z- axis orientation anymore.

[TVeyes]

Svengali emailed me a rather clever approach to creating normal maps without seams, which allows the use of both the edit mode Smooth Brush and ZMapper.

The idea is simply to set Brush > Wrapmode to 2 which simulates the effect of 4 brushes, create the normal map and crop it to 1/4 the size

The only real drawbacks of this approach are the increased amount of polygons needed to create the required details and the maximum ZMapper output size, both 1/4 of your polygon/pixel budget.

Placing details at specific locations can be done by using visual aids such as materials or polygroupings but singular strokes that overlap the edges are not possible.

For many output sizes and tileable normal map designs I would imagine this method is perfect.

Thanks Svengali

[system]

Thanks TVeyes (and Svengali!), my coworkers and I have been using this method for the past few weeks and it works really well! There’s the added bonus that you get a preview of what your texture looks like tiled.

P.S. Does anyone happen to know if there’s a way to set the default wrapmode for all brushes to be “2” instead of “0”?

[TVeyes]

There are a couple of ways to set the brush settings but not on a global/automated basis as you request.

Simply saving a brush preset to Zstartup/BrushPresets will load that brush upon startup. So instead of selecting the Stich3 brush you select the Stitch3Wrap brush you created.

A script could select a brush for you and set various brush settings but would require you to use the script buttons to select brushes instead of using the brush icon. Another variation would have the script select each brush one by one and set various brush settings.

And finally you could record a macro that sets one or more brush settings and assign a hotkey to it. This still requires you run the macro after each brush change.

They are probably all options you are aware of but that is all I can think of.

[wallasaurus]

As far as I could tell none of the brushes work if you have an alpha and/or texture selected when restricting deformations to 1 axis. Not sure if this is intended behaviour/limitation or a bug.

I reckon this might be a bug, I’ve started a thread in the questions forum about it before I knew of this thread (I did search, just didnt find this one though)

Thanks for all the ideas for workarounds! Let’s hope it can be remedied at some point in the future.

[system]

Hello Zbrushers,

I am having problems creating repeating patterns like others in this thread. I am trying to create patterns by starting my design using the simple brush directly on the canvas, using the tilde key to move around and then exporting. The purpose of these repeating patterns is to create fabric prints. Whenever I export the image there is a black border around the design making it useless as a repeating pattern.

I have tried using the suggestions laid out by TVeyes in the section “Capturing other maps” to no avail. When I try to do a best render after using his plugin to initially add 32 pixols to each side of the canvas, zbrush 4r4 crashes every time. I am able to avoid zbrush crashing during the best render if I start directly using the SimpleBrush onto the canvas rather than drawing out a Plane3D as TVeyes suggests, but when I finish all of his steps I end up with a semi transparent border around the exported image rather than the black border I had previously - which is marginally better but still not useful as the pattern is not seamless.

Is there a new method of fixing this problem in 4r4? I am really pulling my hair out over solutions to this problem.

Any suggestions would be great.