Saving intricate mask in zbrush
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.
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.
Replies
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
Although, I would suggest many saves from there on.