ZBrushCentral

Getting a unshaded look

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’m trying out the z applink at the moment and it seems to work well but I have a few questions.

  1. If I want my model to be unshaded but still lit so that I can get a good idea of what the texture looks like on the 3D model with out shaders how do I do this?

  2. The Zapp uses the canvas size. How does this work with your final texture size? So for example I have a tpage that’s 2048 x 2048 but in Zapp I’m painting at a res of 640 x 480. So does Zbrush just either squeeze this size down to fit in the UV’s on your 2048 tpage or upsize it if the area you’ve been painting is smaller then the same space occupied on the original 2048 UV space. Not sure if that makes sense and I don’t know if it’s going to be a problem or not I’m just wondering how it all works.

Thanks in advance

Pete B

#2

Hi,

  1. There will always be a trade off between the actual texture values and the shading. With most materials you should not worry about it. Currently I apply the Fast Shader material, with Ambient set to 75 and Diffuse to 25 (100 total). I use a single light set at 1.0 Intensity and Ambient at 0. Also before I activate ZappLink I reposition the light, if needed, so I can see the volumes. (quickly done by pressing CTRL + p). With ZappLink I use the Shaded Layer + Color Adjustment Layer.

If you want to adjust the material values or number of lights, then make sure the combined Ambient values (from material and light) + the Difuse value equals 100 and that the combined light Intensities equal 1.0. If you have more than 1 light you should of course make sure they point from opposite directions.

The above will result in actual texture values that still darken slightly, due to the shading, but the perceived texture values do not excede and are very close to the actual values. I hope that explanation is understandable. Using anything else than the Fast Shader material and you will have to take into account the Diffuse Curve and other active material modifiers and is just not needed for what you want.

  1. As far as I understand you should paint textures pretty close to a 1:1 factor between on screen dimension and UV dimension on the texture. That will result in the most accurate transfer of your paint strokes to texture values. In other words, if you have a single polygon on screen that is larger than the UV size on your texture, Projection Master will downscale your paint strokes to the texture, and vice versa.

Playing around with document size + model scale versus texture size will help you get a better feel for what works best.

Hope that helps.

#3

Thanks TVeyes that worked well. I realised that just using the falt colur shader is the way to go if you want to just see the texture with out shading but I always like to have a bit of shade to see the contours of the model.

Another quick question. I can’t seem to find some of the old tutorials that I used to use. One was creating textures from photos, I found one that uses a rock texture and then applies it to a sphere but i’m sure there was another technique where you have an image in the background and then use the clone stamp to brush it over your object. Does anyone know where this is?

Pete B

#4

Render>Fast will turn off shaders within ZBrush so that you can see the model with just the texture and lighting. To turn off all lighting as well (simulating the Flat Color material), use Render>Flat

I think that this tutorial is the one you were referring to.

#5

Glad it worked to your satisfaction. Instead of switching between materials to see the true texture values you can also press the Render > Flat switch which shows the RGB colors of the pixols and no shading. The Render > Fast switch could be an alternative to my previous post, although I find the shading too harsh.

I am not sure I know which tutorial you are talking about for the texture cloning. But remember, you can use all PhotoShop techniques/tools (or whatever application ZappLink connects to) to texture your mesh. So the PhotoShop Clone Stamp tool would be a candidate here.

Just for others reading, here is Aurick's [Projection Painting](http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=20352) tutorial. Aurick's [Precision Texturing - part 2](http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=27680) tutorial has information regarding the document size vs. texture size. And just for good measure, and because I love this technique, Aurick's [Creating Seamless Alphas and Painting Bump Maps](http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=30406) tutorial. Edit: I guess you were talking about Chris Baker's (Atwooki) [ZappLink: head texturing tutorial.](http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=30015)