Quick Zbrush 4 Polypaint Question

kunglao

Hi all,
I have just been toying with painting my Game model using for the 1st time Polypaint in Zbrush 4.
Through tutorials i have got the basic workflow down to incorporate Xnormal to bake my Diff Texture.

My Question is when i load my saved head into Zbrush it has what appears to be polypainitng already on it (obviously from testing earlier and saving out for Xnormal).
How can i clear this so i can start new?

Thanks everyone.

JR

Choose white or your preferred color on the color picker;
On the top of your work area, there are some tool controls - mrgb, rgb, m. Be sure only RGB is selected;
Go to color pallete and press Fill object button.

kunglao

Many thanks.
I will try that.
Do this also remove the material? as i think i had MRGB turned on when i was testing.
Regards

cryrid

Do this also remove the material?

If M or MRGB is turned on, then it will also fill the object with the current material.

Bigjohn

kunglao wrote: »

Many thanks.
I will try that.
Do this also remove the material? as i think i had MRGB turned on when i was testing.
Regards

The Flat Color material in zBrush is special in that it literally has no material and color assigned to it. That means that if you have the Flat Color material selected, and are in MRGB mode, and fill the object with white, it will erase all color and material information from the tool.

h2olt

Bigjohn wrote: »

The Flat Color material in zBrush is special in that it literally has no material and color assigned to it. That means that if you have the Flat Color material selected, and are in MRGB mode, and fill the object with white, it will erase all color and material information from the tool.

OMG, THANK YOU! This is impossible to find in tutorials and documentation. That's helped a lot.

I still have one sticky issue with materials. But I figured it out midway through typing this question.

I had a small patch of geometry whose material wasn't clearing or re-assigning. but it turn out something was being saved at a different subdivision level.

So the solution was to step through all the subdivision levels filling the material with Flat Color all the way up and down.

-H

Froyok

h2olt wrote: »

OMG, THANK YOU! This is impossible to find in tutorials and documentation. That's helped a lot.

In fact, this is explained is the official doc but it's very hard to find it.
That's sometimes why I don't like zBrush, the doc is very weird to read and not well organized.

Returning to Default Behavior

Sometimes you might like to return a subtool to its default behavior of using whatever material is currently selected in the Material palette. To do this, simply fill the subtool with the FlatColor material. This essentially erases the embedded material from the subtool. From that point forward, any time you select a new material the subtool will immediately update to use that material.
To return the entire model to this default behavior you will need to fill each subtool individually with the FlatColor material.

http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Materials_and_SubTools

cryrid

I still wish they'd unlock the wiki to certain members similar to how Polycount's is set up. It's a shame the community can't currently contribute to it to keep things organized and up to date.

Michael Knubben

Bigjohn wrote: »

The Flat Color material in zBrush is special in that it literally has no material and color assigned to it. That means that if you have the Flat Color material selected, and are in MRGB mode, and fill the object with white, it will erase all color and material information from the tool.

Has this changed in recent versions? I'm filling my object (mrgb checked, 'fill object') with the Flat Color material selected, and it's still just filling it with white (as in: selected objects don't highlight brighter, and changing the active colour doesn't colour the object)

edit: other things I tried: filling material and colour seperately, making sure I had the default brush selected, making sure I had no layers (I didn't), creating a layer, filling it and baking...
I really don't know what else to try!

Burr

I'm having a similar problem in that I cannot get my model to remain lit (I assume I filled it with a matcap at some point). I can Fill Object with Flat Color, and the model will receive lighting effects again, but as soon as I go to make changes to one of the layers, it pops back to being its original material and everything's dark again.

I tried going through all the subdivision layers and filling each with Flat Color as h2olt suggested, but clicking layers still returns it to its lightless material.

Do layers store materials at all? From playing with a cylinder, they don't appear to. Material only can be painted on a cylinder, but painting Material on a layer in record mode just leaves black strokes.

So what's going on here, why won't my model stay filled with the material I Fill Object it with?

AlexKola

yeah Layers always seem to mess with my polypaint. I would love to sit down with a zbrush developer and have them walk me through how that is supposed to work. Also, I'm finding that in 4r7, filling white or black with the flat color Mat is not restoring my objects to default Mrgb anymore

pixeldamage

I'm having the same issue. ZB 4r7 p3. Fill Flat White erases mat info but not polypaint. Realised this trying to solve another issue (my model gets square edges around the sides that are a refresh issue (disappear when forces a viewport refresh by rotating). Thought it might be fighting with polypaint/mat info but it's ZBrush using Dynamic Subdivs. Remaking my SDs fixed that issue.