Specifically on brushes? I feel the answer to this must be under my nose if it is doable, but flipping through the documentation isn’t coming up with anything specific for me. I’m fairly new to ZBrush and essentially teaching myself the workflow so I’m still discovering new techniques as it were.
Here’s the closest success I’ve had to accomplishing my goal: Let’s say I have four sculpted hard edge metal safes that are already set up with their low poly base meshes and heavy subdivisions I am using to polypaint and deform for later Texture and Normal Map creation respectively. Lets say I want to put the same keypad on all of them, like this for example:
http://img.directindustry.com/images_di/photo-g/vandal-proof-keypad-32365-2660761.jpg
Instead of making a mesh for the keypad and simply placing it on each mesh, I instead want to place it directly on the surface of the model as a texture/normal map. Maybe to have a keypad flush with the finish on the safes or something. However I also want to drop colour information and deformation at the same time.
The closest I’ve come to doing this is with the alpha and texture options for the brushes. Make a colour file for the texture, and a displacement map for the alpha, set the brush to a drag dot or rectangle and place it on the mesh. That works splendid except for one issue: The alpha that dictates the height of the deformations also dictates the opacity of the colour. Is there a way to separate this functionality? Maybe apply two alphas, one for displacement and one for colour masking? Or disable the alpha’s influence on the colour altogether?
Alternatively, is there a way to accomplish this effect with some of the other tools that would be better? This is just the approach I figured out by playing around with a polysphere before getting stumped on the issue of deforming and colouring simultaneously without binding the two to the same alpha.
Also while I’m posting, I have two other small questions related to this: I found a quick way to drop a base finish to work on is to set the model’s UV to repeat a certain number of times, apply a tiling texture to the mesh and then convert it to polypaint to work on. I tried doing this with a matching displacement map (say I made a tiling heavy fabric texture and then a displacement map to bring out the fibers in the normal map a little) which looks great while the displacement map is applied. However, once I drop the displacement map to the mesh itself, it only does so as if the U and V repetitions were still set to 1 each. Any way to get the displacement maps to apply to the mesh at whatever the UV repeat is set to?
And finally, is there a way to get polypaint to apply to a layer while in zsub mode? You can polypaint and zsub congruently on the mesh normally, which is great for dropping things like big dents and scars and the like I imagine, but I think zsub on a layer makes it reveal the colour under it. Usually it has no polypaint at all for me experimenting because I don’t have paint under the layer. It’d be nice to drop those aforementioned dents and scars onto a layer I can flick on and off for reference sake, without having to paint into them separately after the deformations have been done.
Thanks mates. Suggestions would be great as I feel I’m right on the tip of figuring out a very quick way to spruce up a mesh with fine and pleasing details without having to worry about painting them separately later.
