Zbrush - tiling textures. HELP!

pixelpatron

There are a ton of tutorials out there on how to setup scenes, and actual creation. Yet what I've found little on is how to actually get the final images out of zbrush. (The mode where you use the "~" to tile and wrap the texture.)

QUESTIONS:

1) How do I get my final diffuse, normal, spec outta this damn thing?

2) Also when placing sub tools I've ran into an issue. I've got the meshes onto the canvas, yet I rotate them to my desired angle, yet when I use the move tool it then pops back to it's original rotation, or appears to do it's best to wrap around the other meshes already placed onto the canvas. How do I prevent this?

3) Also there is no undo in this view?

4) I did a simple grab doc on my texture yet when I brought it into photoshop there was a seam on the edge. Is this normal?

Thanks gang.

Jeza87

This video series helped me learn about ZBrush texture creation, give it a good look if you haven't already.

http://www.youtube.com/user/bradhb3d/videos

Good luck!

Eric Chadwick

1. I used different matcap shaders to do that. There's an included one for normal mapping, but I dug around and found someone that made a better fuller-range normal map matcap. I think it was on Zbrushcentral?

2. Never saw this problem, sorry.

3. Undo works for me.

4. I found I had to change the Render to "Best" to get rid of seams. http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/materials-lights-rendering/rendering/

cryrid

Try this if you're getting seams: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?94752-Useful-small-ZScripts-and-Macros-for-ZBrush-4-amp-4R3&p=848052&viewfull=1#post848052

general_sogun

Precisely.

But when you render with best render, you get a dark border, which shows up in photoshop: your texture therefore won't tile, because the dark seam will be there. OR because you used materials that react to the Sun-light position, therefore the left and right  (or top/down) edges of your render won't match ==> your texture in Photoshop won't tile. OR if you used aggressive brushes in Zbrush like Clay or Crumple, which heavily and chaotically kick the geometry around! The goal is to NOT have that dark border and have perfectly matching left-right lights+shadows.

 
Solution:
1. Search "seamless" "tileable textures zbrush" here
2. Zbrush Central has the SeamlessTexture02.zip you need.

You just needed special techniques to make the border disappear. Not too hard. Its the solution-hunting experience that will make you learn for real!

BTW:   Here is the method I use!

With this:

You can perfectly well use any material, any aggressive brush or even SNAKE HOOK BRUSH or ANY ZSpheres created ivy / tentacle geometry  with the Sun lighting technique too, so you can set the sun-light to your favorite position, where you like the render best. Then just sculpt multiple objects that you need tiled. Like nicely detailed stones - ONE BY ONE. Meaning you create multiple beautifully sculpted **subtools** and render them one by one in the center of the window, preferably while putting them ON TOP of a "clear table" / grey or white plane, so you will get the sun shadows rendered as well.  This way you can configure the shadows how long you want and how sharp you like!

Then bring all these separate stone renders into Photoshop and using layer-types or just the layer properties, make the background white plane disappear, so now you have an amazingly rendered stone with its shadow.. on a transparent background! Or you just do / enhance the shadows with DROP SHADOW (photoshop layer feature), etc..

Then in this case here is the great amazing secret:

Bring your beautiful, shadowed transparent renders - preferably like 10+ stone or brick or skull or any object renders into Krita.
Press W to get WRAP AROUND MODE. (Shift+W if you like it in latest version, but you can modify the shortcuts, just write into the shortcut-search field: WRAP, then change it back to the old W shortcut, if you like)
Place all your 10+ stone or brick renders  into that wrap-around-tiling document
Notice that you can freely move your amazing renders AROUND BY HAND and they will TILE BEAUTIFULLY!!
And create the best amazing TILED TEXTURE however you want it, freely moving around the stones in any combination + any size (you can resize the stones!).  
This gives you the amazing MODULARITY.
Infinite Advantage of this method is that you are not bound by your single-image Zbrush TILED SCULPTURE, because its an unchangeable WHOLE and you cannot MOVE PARTS OF YOUR SINGLE SCULPTED MESH AROUND.

Think about this amazing solution for a bit. And you will find this superior. It allows you to absolutely NOT WORRY about any tiling in Zbrush. Because Krita will make your separate stones AUTOMATICALLY TILE!!!

You then fill the screen with your rendered stone-objects, until there are no holes in the image in KRITA.

BINGO! You get a fantastic tiled texture. However you like it!

Then If you want to change some stones' position, you can DO IT by hand immediately in seconds!! And Krita faithfully shows your newly modified beautifully tiling texture!

Its much faster than agonizing with Nanotiles, moving-duplicating all subtools with the above script, which creates LOTS OF EXTRA GEOMETRY you need to delete or your machine slows down to a crawl in Zbrush.

There is no geometry in Krita. Its Super Fast! You can render like 50 beautiful stones (rotated, flipped) and in Zbrush, so you have PLENTY of SEPARATE STONE RENDERED IMAGES to choose from you can work with.  Immediate TILED results in Krita!!

Also the numbered solution I wrote above is also very well worth researching! You'll see!  Especially if you need your whole-image ALPHAs / displace-maps together with your whole image RENDERS to create elaborate PBR Substance maps.

Benjammin

I did a breakdown of my method for tiling textures in Zbrush over here https://polycount.com/discussion/227641/zbrush-non-square-tileable-technique#latest (tbh I meant to reply in this thread, but had too many tabs open)