ZBrushCentral

Explain U0VO - U1V0 - U0V1 maps

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

So I have a headskin model and it is double layered to represent the actual thickness of the skin. The inside part is just flesh color the outside has all of the carefully painted textures and displacements … so when I would make a map, I really didnt want the inside included in the UV map, so I UV mapped it in Z brush, different islands/polygroups inside and out, and in 3DS max I just dragged the unwanted part off of the UV grid, expanded the important part to fill the uv space, and then returned to zbrush and then reexported the maps… That all worked fine, but it created 3 maps, 1 that I wanted named Name_U0_V0.tiff and then to represent the parts I dragged off it made Name_U1_V0.tiff and Name_U0_V1.tiff

Now this isnt a problem, but I dont understand quite what happened or if there is a better way to apply mapping/ UV to just one part of a model so as not to have a large texture map that is mostly not needed. I know one can use UV master to make the important part 4x and the rest 1/4 x, but this worked I just dont understant the 3 maps or the nomenclature that zbrush placed on them…

thanks

#2

You can think of the UV space as a grid of squares. “UV” stands for the two axes - just the same as X and Y but U and V are used instead so that there is no confusion with the X,Y,Z of 3D space. Each axis starts at 0. The first square has its bottom left corner at the origin where both the axes are at 0. It then extends as far as 1 in both directions. This is the default square, or UV “tile”, for ZBrush. It can’t handle directly any of the tiles outside of this. But other programs can, so when you drag parts out of this default tile they are just moved into a different tile, and the program can still use them.

The Multi Map Exporter plugin can recognise when the UVs have UV tiles. It can output the maps correctly so that they can be used in a program that supports UV tiles. In order to label each map so that it’s clear which tile it belongs to, the plugin includes the U and V in the file name. You can set up exactly how they are named in the MME options. For example, the form “<_uu_vv>” will use the starting point for each axis, so that for the default tile (outlined pink in the image below) the map will be called “Name_u0_v0.tif”, and “<_uU_vV>” will use the end points giving a file name of “Name_u1_v1.tif”.

UVs.jpg

Attachments

UVs.jpg

#3

I didn’t realise that Zbrush supported UV tiles. Hmm, will need to look into this.

#4

Thank you