Hi all,
First of all, let me tell I am not an artist and have very little knowledge of zbrush. I know what most of you will tell - “use polypaint”, “there are tons of polypaint video tutorials on net” etc. Nope!
I have managed to find two kinds of tutorials - one, where mesh is painted with some color, which is not texture painting, of course. And other kind where meshes are kinda painted with texture. But just kinda - because “painting texture” means automatically tiling texture along the area, for those guys. No ability to see what you actually are doing, which part of texture goes where, actually see your texture and model same time etc. So, I just want to know is ZBrush good for such tasks, or one still has to manually edit UV’s or use another software, may be?
Thanks.
http://pixologic.com/zbrush/features/PolyPaint/
What you’re missing is that PolyPaint can be converted to texture and texture to PolyPaint. This works because with ZBrush your vertex count can match your texture resolution.
After you’ve finished painting, make sure your model has UV mapping. Set your texture size in the Tool >> UV Map sub-palette and then simply click Tool >> Texture Map >> Create >> New From Polypaint. This will transfer your paint to Texture, which will become available in the thumbnail in that sub-palette. From there you can “Clone Txtr” to copy it to the Texture palette for export.
You can assign UV’s automatically using the options in the UV Map sub-palette, or you can use UV Master for more control.
Part of the beauty of PolyPaint is that it is not dependent upon UV’s. You can start painting at any time and UV whenever you want. You can even change UV’s if you decide you want to do so. In fact, you can take a model that already has texture and UV’s you don’t like, divide it to have a number of points equal to the texture has pixels, convert the texture to PolyPaint, change the UV’s to what you do like and then convert the paint back to texture. So PolyPaint gives you a lot of freedom that you don’t have with traditional texture painting.
As long as you’re looking into texturing you should also dig into some tutorials on SpotLight. It’s a wonderful texture painting tool for people who want to paint using source textures. http://pixologic.com/zbrush/features/spotlight/
Thanks for prompt answer, but I was asking about ability to see what portion of texture is currently will be painted on the model. If it is too hard to understand, I’ll make it clear - I mean something like mudbox stencils. Yes, ability to paint textures and to automatically assign uv’s etc. are good, but I need ability to have one big texture and paint different parts of it on the model - not tens of small textures.
Did you watch the video on the Spotlight page that was linked?
As Cryrid said, SpotLight is the answer for what you’re trying to do.
The link to the tutorial for painting with spotlight does not longer work. Can you point me to right location ? Thanks a lot !
This topic is nine years old. 
Pages have been deprecated over the years.
Please see here instead:
SpotLight documentation and video tutorial.
Thanks Aurick ! 
