Hi,
At the moment I am sculpting in relief working with very small heights. eg. between 0 and 3-4mm
I would love to be able to see the Zdepth Alpha/greyscale map constantly in the viewport.
Is there a way of doing this through rendering or Matcaps?
I hope this makes sense.
I can’t think of a way to make this work in exactly the way you want. The Alpha palette > Transfer section has GrabDoc which grabs the current view as a height map. This could then be converted to a texture and loaded into Spotlight as an on screen reference. But although you could automate this so that it worked with a hotkey it wouldn’t amount to real time feedback.
The only other way I could think of was to create a stack of planes as subtools which would be set an appropriate distance apart. This would give you a clear idea of which parts of your sculpt reached above what height. Turning the planes on/off, using Transparent and Solo mode gives a fair amount of flexibility. I’ve attached a ZTool example (load into Tool palette).
MatCaps wouldn’t work as they are based on the mesh normals - which way the polygons are facing rather than what height they are.
Height_test.zip (32.7 KB)Height_test.zip (32.7 KB)
Thanks for the suggestion.
I currently have it set up so when I hover over the model the z value reads as mm so its not a problem of whether I have it at the right height or not.
Its more of a visualization thing that helps when you are dealing in heights of between 0 - .3mm
Hopefully its a thing in the future.