ZBrushCentral

How to use a photoshop image to mask a shape out of shadow box.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I have been trying to use a photoshop image to mask a shape out of the shadow box.
The zbrush tutorials documentation.pdf touches on this idea, but doesn’t explain it well enough.

Just to be clear I don’t want to trace around the pshop image, instead I want to be able to say use the Hue of this image to create a mask and to create shadow box geo.

Could someone please tell me how I can use a Photoshop image to mask out some geometry in my shadow box ?

Thank you.

#2

You need to create the image so that it matches ShadowBox’s UV mapping. To do this, load the ShadowBox128 project from Lightbox, go to the Tool>Texture Map menu and press Clone Txtr. This will copy the texture map to the Texture palette from where you can export it.

  1. Load the ShadowBox texture map into Photoshop.
  2. Use the map as a guide for creating your design. Just make it solid black. Use a new layer and then delete the guide when you’re done, flattening the image. Save it as a grayscale PSD file.
  3. Load the image into ZBrush through the Alpha palette
  4. With ShadowBox loaded, clear any masking by Ctrl+click+dragging the canvas background.
  5. With your alpha selected in the Alpha palette, press Tool>Masking>Mask By Alpha.
  6. Ctrl+click in ShadowBox to get it to update.