Im still a pretty new zbrusher. I have figured some tricks out though.
The new thing Im playing around with may not be new to everyone but for those who havent noticed this combination may love it. Sorry no pics or vids but its really easy.
I wanted a way to burn some light into my textures and collapse the material shader to my characters because They look great with my special skin material but the uvmap is simply collors used to accent my skin shader. Rendering out the skin texture with colors>texture loses lighting details (not reall usefull in crysis). Projection master is to tricky to use for this matter for me.
Heres the trick.
1 apply your materials and dont be afraid to use color in them
2 sculpt and detail your model then texture you model in preview mode, as long as it looks good there it will look the same in your final texure
3 clone your model and apply it to the original as a subobject (and make a backup for your own safety, this gets a bit memory hungry)
4 now you can apply a basic quick shader, flat color or white matcap to your original model. You dont want shading to affect your visibility so i recommend flat color.
5 enable transparency and unhide your new subobject, you want to select zproject and disable zadd/subtract. You just want to use draw rgb and you can adjust the intensity for flavor.
6 just draw and rotate your model, the technipue will burn lights, materials and textures into one uv all at once. Only works with transparency enabled!
You want to rotate the model so your drawing in the light, naturally you dont want too much shadow or shine so this is a learned skill that takes a while to get down but the final product can look as good as your viewport. I recommend masking and hiding unecessary areas simply to cut down on shadowing. You can get a good look at your texture by switching to flat render to check status and switching back to continue painting.
This isnt the best for render guys but the game modelers can use this almost exlusively without resorting to photoshop. That is if your mats and textures are good enough. Zbrush can make even the worst uvs look great though.
