How do you texture this?

Maximum-Dev

Hi,

For instance, it's the heightmap from the bake of a tileable sculpt in zbrush. But I'm not able to mask out the pebbles from ground perfectly in any of the baked maps. So wondering what's the approach to texturing these kind of zbrush sculpts.



Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks.

JedTheKrampus

Can't you just adjust the levels since all the pebbles are higher than most of the ground? It won't be perfect but you should be able to mask most of them.

For the rest of them maybe you can take the heightmap into Zbrush or Mudbox and put it on a tiling plane and paint it there.

Maximum-Dev

Adjusting levels couldn't be 100% neat really. I'm eager to find some perfect approach.
But thanks for the reply.

Millenia

Use polypaint to colourise the different materials so you can easily select them in Photoshop? That's what I'd do, anyway.

JedTheKrampus

You could start off with levels and then clean it up in Zbrush. That's what I'd do. Or, if you have a highpoly around for it you could get a very clean mask from that.



That's as clean as I could get it. Not super clean but it's better than starting from scratch in Zbrush from the displacement map. You could do a few different levels filters with different intervals and erase some of them to get a better result.

leleuxart

Generally, you'd get the mask at the same time as the other maps, but I think like others have said, Levels and Photoshop blend layers are probably the best bet now. 

Maximum-Dev

Thank you.
I watched this video when he imports his subtools in zbrush they are already textured and thus when baking there is already a clean diffuse baked with it. There is no explanation on the texture at that point but is polypaint the only way to texture the high poly pieces you later use to create tileables?
http://eat3d.com/free/zbrush_tile

JedTheKrampus

Nope you can paint a whole Ptex texture set on any sort of high poly, or you can UV your highpoly and paint that texture ahead of time. But you'll have to follow a different procedure for baking, like positioning the pieces in Maya and rendering with an orthographic camera and multiple AOVs in mental ray for instance.

Also check out this for tilable sculpts, it's more flexible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bepQk_GHAY4