Saving intricate mask in zbrush

scourgewarper

I have a flat 2 million poly plane for which i've sketched out an intricate mask which has taken a couple of hours. I'm doing it this way so that I can apply an offset amount in the deformations pallette so it uniformly deforms the masked areas at an even height/falloff. I wanted to save the mask as an alpha so I could come back to it however that was a big mistake; after leaving it for an hour with the icon whirring in busy mode it crashed. I assume this is because of the very high polycount I have the mask applied to.

Is there a way to save this mask? It's very intricate and I need to save all of its detail and apply it if I need to load the model again.

scourgewarper

Just in case anyone needs to I found out how to save your mask in zbrush:

1. Goto the texture palette and create a new texture with whatever resolution you want (I used 2048x2048).
2. Click 'create alpha' in the masking palette.
3. Your mask is now an alpha which you can export for later use.

thomasp

just wondering - why didn't you do it the other way round - create a mask in photoshop/illustrator or similar and import it into zbrush as an alpha?

scourgewarper

I sort of tried that however rather than one big alpha I made a number of 'flame' alphas in photoshop; im modeling a gothic arch door and I want to create embossed flames around the edges tapering inwards.

As I said the door has a gothic arch shape at the top so i'm not exactly sure how I would paint an alpha in photoshop to match the doors shape as alphas are square, I suppose you could always sketch the shape in ps, make the patterns as I would in zbrush and apply it using the drag stroke type to fit it, however I went for the masking method in the end although i'm gonna try that now lol!

Incidentally I can't save a mask as an alpha on my particular door although the method I described above is valid, I think my door has a weird shape and I had to quadrify it myself in max which was a bit messy, not sure if that would affect making an alpha from a mask but basically everytime I try to create an alpha from the mask zbrush crashes.

NAIMA

Just seen this and was searching but , I wonder DO I need to have the model unwrapped befoure applyong this texture map as alpha?

Butthair

Yes, the model should have a flat unwrap as it would project the texture alpha onto the mesh referencing it's UVs. If the unwrap is not evenly distributed, resulting in stretching, the application of the alpha might be off.

I tend to paint in the base lines for the alpha so I know the scale and placement well, then refine it in Fotoshoppe where I have more control.

NAIMA

SO to unwrap I shoudl redo the base mesh with proper uvmapping then reimport and redo the work?

cryrid

You could try out several of the automatic UV options / UV Master inside zbrush to see if any of them would produce suitable results. It shouldn't take long to test.

You could also try saving the mask as polypaint data by filling it in with black RGB. You'll only be able to store one mask this way, but if that's all you need then you probably wont have to worry about UVs

NAIMA

or may be i could go back to subdivision 1 unwrap that and then save the uvmap as a mask?

Avanthera

Yep. Tho if you are sculpting a standard plane or primitive from zbrush or another modeling program, then it should have uv's already.

Naima: you can drop down to sub-d lvl 1 and export out, then uv in whatever program you choose then re-import over your model in zbrush.

Cryrid: I use this all the time! def a good Idea.

Also; you can save a mask in a layer, just create a layer, do your masking, and then go on to the next layer. Your masking will disappear till you return to that layer. Each layer can hold 1 set of masking, deformation, and polypaint, I think.

NAIMA

Yes but if I export my low level model and uvmap and reimport I woudl have to redo by scratch all the modeling work I did so far no?

cryrid

As long as the topology/vert order doesn't change, then reimporting the mesh should only update the UVs while preserving everything else.

NAIMA

can you tellme exactly how to follow the steps I am pretty new to zbrush and I wouln't want to delete what I did when I usually delete all then zbrush asks me to keep something shoudl I say yes or not?

cryrid

Just save your .ztl file (save it twice under a different name if you wanted a backup), or duplicate the mesh as a subtool and work on that. Then if you do accidentally mess up, you can always go back to the saved version.

As for replacing the UVs, export as an obj, and open it in whatever program you use. UV it, and export that back as an obj. Import that back into zbrush. If you have a program that is goz compatible, that option should work fine as well. If done correctly, you won't see any message/warning at all and it wont look like anything has changed. But if you go to Tools >> UVMAP >> Morph UV, you'll see the mesh will have the updated UVs.

Ace-Angel

PS: You can also save your masks in Layers, and hide them when you don't need them.

Although, I would suggest many saves from there on.