I’ve read through the tutorials in the wiki and all that stuff, but I can’t get the zproject brush to work like it does in the tutorials. The object being projected either comes out in totally the wrong place or as a mass of spiky crap,or both! any ideas??
Well if you read the wikki, it only works in Zdepth. Now if you follow the steps it works everytime, tested it several times myself. If you don’t follow the steps you get a mess. You must also be working over an area that has mesh, if you go off the mesh, weird things happen, something about infinity… 
I made some weird things early on in beta testing.
I’m following the tutorials on the ZProject brush to the best of my ability and I’ve had no luck whatsoever, same results as the 1st poser.
I’ve had success with the bas relief tut and the texture tut using the
project brush…Sebcesoir’s tutorial gave me a bad case of the spikeys,
or I wasn’t able to hit the remaining poly normals to send the geometry
‘projecting’ onto the base geometry. I’ll have to try again later.
I get that the point is to not project your polygons out away from your
base sculpt (if you view Seb’s movie you’ll see he doesn’t use the brush
unless it’s got the base sculpt as a ‘backdrop’ from the camera view), but
my chosen geometry to project with the brush didn’t work well (a 3d
cylinder sub-divided about 4 times).
I found in the bas relief tutorial that you have to fiddle with the settings
(z-intensity, draw-size, and even the Project value on the brush) to get
it to work properly. Also, try to switch Stroke type back and forth from
‘Drag Rect’ to ‘Freehand’ as it seemed buggy for me. You’ll also get stepping
with the geometry depending on how sub-divided your base and projected
meshes are.
Hope it helps. 
Bas relief works for me, however it’s “offset” as in it’s getting a perfect transfer but it’s not centered on top of where the source model is, rather it’s just left of it. I don’t know what is causing the offset… And yeah, I can’t get that other tutorial to work at all.
When using ZProject for sculpting it is important to check that you don’t have a transpose action line which will cause an offset (in the same way as you can pick a painting area with ZProject painting). This is what you do:
-
Line up your subtools
-
Select the subtool that you want to project on to
-
Enter Move mode and click on the model to remove the Transpose line. A single click is all that’s necessary.
-
Switch to Draw mode and the ZProject brush
-
Sculpt away. Make sure to rotate the model as necessary to keep the sculpting in the Z [screen] direction. Holding down Alt can help, as can switching to Smooth (hold down Shift) to remove jaggies and creases.
HTH,
Aaaaaahhh that feels better, thanks everyone. Turns out the problem was the transpose tool like Marcus said, with a little help from rookie-z’s switching between drag rect and freehand brush modes. For some reason the thumbnail for those two tends to get stuck on the drag style of brush, which wasn’t helping me much either. Excellent, it worked like a charm this time around.
Question: How do you draw the drag-rect stroke as this tut indicates.
I can’t seem to find a way to start the stroke anywhere except on the
plane, rather than on the face. Any attempt to start it on the face simply
rotates all the tools.
The result is that my final relief is skewed in height. Greater Z-depth at
the centre of the stroke (as you’d expect with a radial fade alpha).
Hmm. Thinking about it. a Flat alpha would do the trick, but the tut’ says
to use a radial fade???
BTW: I had the same ‘wrong stroke’ problem as rookie-z. I had to switch
stroke out and back before I actually got a dragrect, definitely a bug there.
G.
When I click move it turns the brush to the transpose line (which is normal I know) and in his tutorial it gives him this line, but does not change his brush - I get nothing beyond this point - the transpose line does not affect the brush - what am I missing?
Using the image plane plugin I can get it working for color, but not depth so I am making progress - still experimenting:).
Very odd - I set up an image plane and a standard sphere - works perfect with rgb info - then I switch to my target set of subtools - nothing - absolutely nothing doing the exact same set of steps that worked for the sphere - now this is screwy
Ok - narrowed it down to the fact there are subtools on the target object - when I delete all subtools it works perfectly so I am back to experimenting how to get around this without breaking up the entire object subtool by subtool
Ok - it is only commented on all over the freaking web that subtools are broken with zproject until version 4 comes out so gimme a sec so I can wipe the egg off my face, heh - back to work…