Tileable Maps In ZBrush - Issues

Lulufinder

Here's my process:

- Select the Plane3D tool and drag it onto the canvas, activate Edit Mode
- Click ‘Make PolyMesh3D’
- Snap the plane to the front view and click tool>UV Map>Create>Uvp (planar map)
- Subdivide several times with smooth off (tool>Geometry>Smt)
- Sculpt the plane with wrap mode activated on the brush (brush>curve>wrap mode

The problem I keep having is the consistency of my map export. Most times I click on 'Create DispMap' in the tool>displacement map palette I end up with something with a bunch of vertical bars. This leads me to believe that my UVs aren't correct so I try doing a planar map again and checking it with tool>texture map>create>new from UV map. This usually results in a yellow square with a thick black bar on the bottom and right side of this test texture map (clearly incorrect). I've tried bringing in my own polyPlane from maya to avoid have to deal with the UVs inside of ZBrush, but I keep running into the same problem. I was able to get it to work properly once but I have no idea what I did differently.

I just tried one more time and this time I got a proper dispalcement map but there's a thick blank border around the texture.. ugh.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong here?

cryrid

The UVs are probably touching the borders, which will cause issues when trying to bake. If you're working on a plane though, you don't really need UVs. Just size the document to the texture res that you want, frame the plane, and export that.

Lulufinder

Interesting.. How would I go about generating a normal map or displacement map without generating UVs first? What method do you use after framing the plane to export your maps? Sorry, ilm relatively new to ZBrush so I'm still trying to get a handle on the workflow.

Goat Justice

You can use the MRGBZGrabber tool to get a depth map and RGB grab from the document. You'll probably want a better normalmap MatCap for though... the one ZBrush comes with is a bit harsh. Here's a link that might help more than my quick explanation:

http://eat3d.com/free/zbrush_tile

he starts grabbing maps about 12:40 in

Joshua Stubbles

Using MRGBGrabber is directly related to the window size of the document and not the actual document size. So if you have a 2048 doc and have AAHalfSize on, MRGBGrabber will save out a 1024 texture. Use the normal "grabdoc" function in alpha/texture to get the full document size (though aliased).
You'll also want to toggle the "best" render preview in the render settings, which defaults to "preview" mode. Do that before using MRGBGrabber. This will get rid of the stupid black bars that surround 1-2 edges of the document while in "preview" mode.

Lulufinder

Awesome, this works perfectly. I was having trouble at first getting my polyPlane to actually frame to the canvas at first. It was leaving a pixel gap or so on one of the sides but I somehow got it to work. Thanks!

Lulufinder

There's a few things that I'm having trouble getting my head around:

- When I start sculpting with my polyPlane filled to my canvas I'm still easily able to accidently rotate the view. Is there any way to lock the camera so that I don't do this.. There's something about sculpting a tileable pattern that makes me want to start my strokes slightly off canvas but this of course rotates the view.

- If I start sculpting deep enough near the edges, the polyPlane is no longer filled to the canvas since the edges are now further back or forward in Z. This seems inevitable but is there any way around this other than being extra careful when sculpting near the sides.. This makes it pretty difficult to maintain a tileable pattern. I almost wish I could drop it to the canvas and still be able to use the sculpting brushes so that I could use the ~ key to pan around to address the "seams".

Joshua Stubbles

The only way I know to lock the view would be to drop the object to canvas, paint and then pick it back up.

The other issue, I'm not so sure. The tiling textures I've made in ZBrush were made from other objects, cobbled together. I haven't made a straight sculpted texture yet.

Like this one here: http://www.ivassago.com/images/rocksculpt01.jpg

All of the rocks were sculpted individually, then assembled in a 2.5D canvas. To straight sculpt a rockface though, I honestly wouldn't know how to approach that yet. I have a total of about 5 months experience with ZBrush, so I'm still learning.

cryrid

Make sure perspective is off, and perhaps limit which directions your brush pushes in (transform: modifiers). Or try a more subdivided grid with a higher wrap mode setting