OK. I give up. How do i assign material for selected subtool, not for whole object?

[system]

I know this question probably raised many times, and i remember that in past i somehow managed to fill only selected subtool with selected material, ans it was not a problem at all.
Unfortunately, i do not remeber how i managed to do this and now i’m completely lost. Is there some video tutorial or something? I will be grateful for anything which will finally help me solve this problem.

I follow this tutorial http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/materials-lights-rendering/materials/ but no matter how many times i use “Color: Fill object” command, when i load new material all objects is painted in this new material overwriting old material. I try to add materials which i need to C:\Program Files (x86)\Pixologic\ZBrush 4R6\ZMaterials folder, so that i will not need to load new material everytime, but with no success.

[system]

Hi,

Here’s a tutorial that helped me with the same problem some time ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G--u9lsrqyQ

Hope it will help you too

Good luck!

[Altea]

I suppose you have M (material channel) on when you use fill color. This will allow use materials only (no color). MRGb for both.

If not there are some circumstances where fill color materials won’t work, for example with layers. But if you hide (deactivate it is not enough) all layers you will be able to fill the mesh with material. Then you can activate the layers again.

[system]

Thank you JFilipI tryied this tutorial, but i do not need to change color. And when i leave only “M” button on, everything changes, all materials allover all subtools object.
I tried to assign and reassign materials may be for thousand times now. It is frustrating that sometimes it works and sometimes it does not.

Thank you Altea
I used “M”, “RGB”, “Mrgb” in different variations, but with no success. How do i hide layers? If we can finally find a logical solution for this problem, and work out simple and understandable alogorithm, it will be a relief for all, i believe.

[marcus_civis]

If your model doesn’t have any polypainting then using Fill Object with just “M” on will still fill your model with white. This means the model no longer takes on the selected color. You can’t avoid that.

Also, if you have a texture map on your model then this will hide any material that you embed. (You can actually embed a material in the texture map, using Tool>Texture Map>Fill>Fill Mat.)

[Altea]

As photoshop and most layers systems you can hide clicking in the eye of each layer

[system]

Thank you for your help, but nothing is work for me. I tried to hide subtools and assign material only to visible, but when i unhide them they have same material which a assigned for visible subtool.

Thank you for a tip with texture, but i try to avoid writing in texture. Instead i want color info stored in polypaint, not in texture.

If nothing will work i guess i will store material in each subtool’s texture and then try to copy it from texture to polypaint.

[marcus_civis]

You are switching the material afterwards? The default behaviour is for a subtool to display the selected material so if you only fill some subtools with a material you will need to switch materials before you see the result.

The SubTool Master>Fill option is designed to make it easy to fill the visible subtools with material, color or both.

[Altea]

Not sure if hide subtool has anything to do with my post about hiding layers as both as not the same thing. If you don’t have layers obviously you don’t need to worry about it.

Apart of the problem of not be able to fill (or paint) materials in a subtool with layers you could have masked the full object or deactivated the button tool>polypaint>colorize

The same function has the small icon of brush in the subtool. If it is off it won’t visualize the local material.

[system]

I captured a video of process.

//youtu.be/8kW0OLarvK8

There must be some mistakes, but i can not figure out what i am doing wrong.

[marcus_civis]

Great, thanks, that’s really useful.

What you are doing is loading a new material from disk without selecting a different material first. Materials have “slots” in ZBrush and when you load a material from disk it replaces the selected material, taking over its slot. That is why you are not seeing a change. (I know, this is not the way you would expect things to behave. It’s a behaviour that dates from when ZBrush was more of an illustration program.)

The solution is to make sure you select a different material in the Material palette before loading one from disk. It won’t then replace any materials you’ve already embedded in your model.

It does mention this in the “Loading Materials” section in the docs but it’s not really obvious what’s happening until things don’t work as expected!
http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/materials-lights-rendering/materials/

[system]

OMG! It is working! Thank you so much marcus_civis
Now, when i understand basic idea behing materials in ZBrush, it is far more easier to figure out what actions i must perform to acheve my goal.
Thank you again.

For those beginners, who may experience the same problem i recorded a video.

//youtu.be/XC2SHCV4PA0

P.S. Don’t know why quality so bad, but i hope video is understandable.