Great tutorial, you helped me find the specific pipeline i’ve been looking for, after much zbrush frustration (though the program is phenomenal, I’m sure you agree :)

i do have one tip, the touching up of the white spots in photoshop, can be done much smoother (for bigger errors or perfectionists) by using Flaming Pears free Solidify B tool, it’ll fill up transparent sections with a smooth texture. Again, great job!

Hi Harke,

Glad that you found the video useful. I’m sure there a better and/or different ways to do most of this stuff, but these methods are producing good results for me. I’m still trying to get my head around the ZBrush tools, very interesting how they have melded 2D and 3D work.

The Flaming Pear Solidify plugin is a great tip. I’ll give that a try next time I have a big gap in one of my textures.

I just wanted to say -thank you- so much for this tutorial vid. I’ve been playing around with a bunch of 3D modeling programs and had the most fun with Zbrush, unfortunately, as with all the programs, I was struggling on how to figure it out. This video was so amazing and you were very informative on your instructions. I would love to see more videos.

Once again, great job, and the Mushroom turned out wonderful.

Kis.

Thanks, Kismet. :)

ZBrush is a blast, and the more I use it, the more I understand where it’s ‘coming from’. hehe Sure is different than most 3D apps. Can you imagine if we had a similar sculpting capability inside of SL? Seems like a prefect fit…

I’m curious as to how you setup your workspace for it. You did a couple of things in video two where I wasn’t quite sure how you pull them off because I went to go to the various areas where that tool was but my zbrush 3 looks different than yours.

Hmm.. I pretty much use the default ZBrush interface. I actually haven’t changed anything since I am still learning and want to make sure my setup is as close to possible as the default. Figured it would help for tutorials.

Any spot in particular where I threw you off? Maybe I can describe what I was doing…Next time I will try to make my button presses and such more obvious.

BTW, I am using ZBrush 3.1, which looks a bit different than v3.0

oh..It’s also possible that you have the limited interface active, although not quite sure what it is called. Maybe Rapid UI? It’s a simpler version of the interface that is the default when you first start using ZBrush 3.

Thanks you so much for spending the time to make this video. I just got zbrush today and am hoping to use it for second life. I was wondering how to get sculpties onto second life though. I haven’t had any success at finding a converter from .obj files to sculpties. I tried to find the 2k suisei program but couldn’t find it. Can you point me to it if it’s still around? I’m loving the potential of zbrush as much as you seemed to when you made the video. Can’t wait to do some sculpting, lol. Thanks again!!! It’s really awesome when people like you take the time to teach others.

I did a bunch of searches on the SL forums with 2k Suisei and sculpty converter and I found. I can’t remember the exact link anymore though. Just keep searching the forums i’m sure you’ll find.

Vlad as for as the lay, I’m pretty much using the default 3.0; I’m starting to think that, thats what was confusing me. I think there are just enough fundamental differences from 3.0 to 3.1 that it was throwing me off and making it harder for me to texture my object. Like for example when I wanted to move me object offset a little so I could see, instead of it being half way behind the background texture. It would actually change, or edit the object itself instead of moving it.

I updated to 3.1 and everything looks fine. However when I was texturing I ran into an issue. When I went to go to color>texture it was all grayed out so I hit enable Uv. then hit color>texture and all I got was a blank texture and it made my object black.

I had a weird little issue too. After I put the mask on the sphere, ctrl+ clicked to smooth out the mask, and started to minimize the size from the deformation options.. i didn’t turn out like that whatsoever.. i saw you had X Y Z selected.. but to get somethin even remotely to look the way you did.. I had to deselect Z. Any idea on what i’m doin wrong? (btw i have 3.1)

You know, Have any of you ever used ventrilo; this is kind of a strange side note. But I think it would be cool to have a little pow-wow on ventrilo and discuss some of the interesting features of zbrush. I’m really digging this program so far. Its a little hard to get at first but slowly its coming to me.

2k’s sculpty converter is in this Forum thread on post #26:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=225856&page=2&pp=15

Direct link to the attachment:
http://forums.secondlife.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=41384

For folks who can’t access the forums, I will ask 2k if I can host the files here on this site…

“when I wanted to move me object offset a little so I could see, instead of it being half way behind the background texture.”

Make sure there is no mask applied to the object when you are trying to move it up above the canvas. You want this to effect the entire object.

“When I went to go to color>texture it was all grayed out so I hit enable Uv.”

I had this problem while learning to work with the ZBrush objects as well. I even went back and tried to dupliacte it but could not. Try initializing or restarting zBrush before starting with a fresh object. The default UV map that comes along with the SPhere primitive will work, so no need to add one or mess with that. Wish I knew what I had done wrong there so I knew what to avoid.

“i didn’t turn out like that whatsoever.. i saw you had X Y Z selected.. ”

It takes some experimentation to get the right set of axis selected when using those deformation tools. I usually just guess, try, then undo and try again. For instance when I wanted to make the stem of the mushroom skinnier, I was changing in the X and Y only. To crush down the cap of the mushroom I was changing Z only.

“But I think it would be cool to have a little pow-wow ”

Yeah, it might be fun, and informative, to have a get together in-world for ZBrush users. If I can find some time to schedule and event I will post about here on Shiny Life.

I found an work around for the color>texture issue. The only problem is, the texture then ends up comes out all pixelated and stuff.

here is an example of what I end up getting for a texture when I found a work around for it. http://www.thefinalstand.com/uo/mushroom-tex.jpg

Basically I found this thing that told me I had to make a new texture, turn divide back down to 1, and then autoUVtiles it again.

But it looks so strange.

Thanks Vlad for the great videos, I have to agree with you when you say ZBrush 3.1 is a magnificent tool, it is very very versatile and grows on you fast, I’ve been importing wings3D made primitives for sculpting and then exporting back to Wings3d for sculpt map creation, but I like the idea of 2K Susei converter, especially if it retains more integrity than the traditional “lossless” upload.

The way to model with more than 1 object in the same workspace is to utilize the subtool function, I find this especially useful when making multi primmed objects like shoes and such, where the prims need to form together in world.

I’d like to pass on a top tip that has saved me the hassle of constantly breaking off from the canvas to modify the brush size, intensity, draw mode etc.. and that is to hit the spacebar, it brings up all the salient info right there under your pen or mouse cursor, ready to be altered.

Keep up the good work and thanks again.

Damen Gorilla

Anyone else with the texture issue?

Atrus, I’ve seen that problem before.

What I think is happening is that you aren’t subdividing your model enough prior to texturing, AND/OR don’t have a big enough texture size.

Process is :

Create Sphere3D
Initialize it to 32H 33V (if using a the wings converter this can be 64H 63V)
Go to the tools palette and make sure disable uvs is UNselected.
Make polymesh 3D
Model with the tools
Export as OBJ

Go to Texture menu at top, set the default tex size to at least 1024 by 1024, bigger the better, but be careful of computer resources.(this tells ZBrush what size you want the texture to be when you hit the color>texture button)

Go to Geometry and divide your model 4 to 6 times, depending on computer resources and level of detail required.

Load in your reference picture as per the video, and clone to the model.

When happy, hit the color>texture button, remembering to leave the AUVtiles or any of those UV buttons well alone.

I hope this is of some help, it took me a long time to figure out that ZBrush will clear UV information if you hit any of the UV types in the tools palette sub menu, useful for some cases, especially in house modeling, but not useful in SL where it expects specific UV co ordinates.

Damen Gorilla

THanks for that clarification, Damen. As I mentioned earlier I also had some issues with the UV maps while figuring out my process. Keep trying Artus - and especially make sure that the Disable UVs is UNselected as Damen mentions.

“The way to model with more than 1 object in the same workspace is to utilize the subtool function, ”

Yes, I def. want to experiment with the subtools for multiple sculpty objects. I got them confused with layers at first but I am seeing the difference now.

NP Vlad, good to see you’ve hit upon the subtools.

I have to say that in the process of buying ZBrush to getting anything usable in SL I have created quite a few swearwords and personal curses that have , I suspect never been rent forth upon the world, but, and this is a huge but ( all joking aside ) ZBrush is the most delicious, versatile and wonderful tool I have ever used in over 7 years of 3D modeling.
You have said it feels like a huge lump of clay on your desktop, and even though I am in no way to be considered artistic, I know exactly what you mean, without ever having a huge lump of clay on my desktop…..

More of these videos means less of my contribution to the sweary side of the English language, keep it up, and if theres a ZBrush group to be formed, shout me up.

Damen Gorilla

Very interesting tutorials. I use ZBrush to modify my objects, and to texture them, but had never thought it was suitable for the creation process itself. I will certainly have to try this!

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

Just want to say GREAT tutorial! Keep it up!

Yeah I ended up making the same object in maya with nurbs for my second sculpty. The first one I did which was actually a mushroom didn’t come out so bad itself. The texturing was the issue I was having so I’ll have see what I can produce now with the new info.

I’m psyched that so many people are finding this video tutorial useful. I’ll do my best to create more similar videos as time allows.

I’m also considering starting up a Sculpty and/or ZBrush users group in SL. Maybe a weekly or every other week meeting to share techniques, toss around a few ideas, and a bit of show and tell. Thinking maybe of a Saturday time slot, early in the SL day. I will announce some details soon.

thanks much vlad

OMG, you rock. I already really knew what I was doing in Zbrush, but your tutorials taught me some new ways of doing things that I think will really help me! I’m really excited to get back home from going to the airport ina few minutes so I can try working the way you work into the way I work in Zbrush. I think with your help, I’m going to have awesome results, so thank you so much!
Please, please figure subtools out for us lol. I’m still having issues in using subtools. Sculpting them and such seems to work right, but texturing the subtools never quite works ;((. Anyway, if you make a tutorial about subtools, I’m going to worship you forever lol.

When i come to make my sculptmap one version just makes everything green and the other says there are too many vertices. What’s that all about??

[…] The Shiny Life Tutorial is excellent - I spent time working with it today and had great success. Shiny Life Video: Creating Sculpted Prims with ZBrush 3 | Shiny Life There is a link in the article to a free program that converts the obj file from zbrush to a […]

Ok so does this mean we have to stick to 32×33 faces? I tried 63×64 but it wont work, i just want to add more detail is all but i’m not sure how it’s calculated =-/

Well, this is an extremely powerful tool, and I really appreciate these tutorials! Right now, I still have Zbrush crashing on me a fair amount, but hopefully I’ll be able to fix that (seemed to happen when I subdivide past about 4).

I had a couple of questions if you had time for them–

*When I went to load a texture from colour, all the buttons save “enable uv” were greyed out. I selected enable, but then my texture turned all black :( Did I miss a step somewhere?

*What would be tremendous to do would be to be able to modify the object with the texture on it. Does the divide polygon step change the number of vertices? In other words, after I create the texture as you describe, can I go wild with the deformation tools and brushes, then resave the new object and still be able to import this modified object to SL successfully?

Thank you again! And if you take requests, love to see a tutorial on how to use the painting tools in Zbrush.

Okies, just tried saving after dividing and ended up with a nasty mess when I created a sculpt map from the object.

Sooo…I’m thinking a better workflow would be to import the texture onto the original (undivided) object, then fiddle with it there. Is that right?

HI Virrginia,

Yes, your second post is is a good idea. I sometimes save the low-poly, 32×33 mesh then do several subdivides to continue to working on the shape. Then you can texture and model at a higher resolution, saving the texture from the high-poly version to put on the low-poly version in SL. This works especially well when you are baking the lighting/shadows.

As far as your problem with the save texture as color.. I had that problem a few times and for the life of me I cannot repeat it on purpose. ? It is certainly some sort of problem with the UV map being missing. It has not happened to me recently. Try starting from a re-initialized zbrush setup - you’ll find that option under Preferences.

If you want to sculpt the object with the texture on it, you can load the texture that you create back onto the object, even the low poly version. I sometimes do this when I am making multiple versions of the a sculpty that will use the same texture - like the individual shapes of an animated sculpty.

It is also possible to paint onto the texture of an object in zbrush, without subdividing the object to paint on the polys. This is actually probably a more common technique. I use the poly-painting because I prefer that way you can use zProject to paint with a photo reference, rather than using the drop to ‘canvas, paint, pick up from canvas steps’ that are involved with painting on the textures.

I do plan on making more zbrush/sculpty tutorials and will do my best to cover the painting tools, even though I am still learning them myself. :)

Oh well I’d love to be able to work at higher than 32×33 but i guess i can’t if i intend to convert it using that tool. It’s a shame really but i guess for standard things such as costume attachments then it’s not so bad. I was trying to make s standard assault vest but i’m starting to realize that it’s pointless because assault vests are pretty close to the body any way so i guess i’ll just make a bump mapped skin using your other tutorial i saw on Veoh, even though that one doesn’t appear to be complete or even on this website =-/

Tactical: You could subdivide the mesh and work at higher rez then save out the lower level subdivision of the mesh. You will loose detail, though, sometimes in places that you don’t suspect. In SL sculpted prims always have exactly the same number of faces, so actaully working at the 32×33 resolution will let you see pretty much exactly what you’ll get in-world.

I don’t have any video on Veoh. :) you must be thinking of someone else’s stuff. Maybe a guy called Canned Mushrooms that I mention somewhere.

http://www.veoh.com/channels/houseofZbrush&

For the longer videos there Veoh will show a 5 min preview. Look for the Download Options link to grab the whole video.

Thank you so much for this tutorial - I’ve had zbrush for over a year and been piddling around on my own trying to figure it out - this workflow really helped me understand some things! /me sits on her sculpted mushroom… TY TY TY! :D

Well, this is tremendously frustrating. I have been completely unable to load any texture at all for export to Photoshop. I’ve been starting with the 32/33 sphere, making a shape, saving it as an object, then subdividing to 5 and painting using the move tool and zproject brush. Every time I click on Col>Txr, I get that black shape:

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x85/vtombola/TexturizingBug.jpg

It doesn’t seem to matter if UV is enabled or not.

I did find one comment on the ZBrush forums about this issue:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=56399&highlight=color+texture

But when I tried using the plug in, for one I found no folder marked “Zplugs” (I have the trial version, not sure if this is the issue). I created a Zplugs folder in the ZBrush folder and dropped the plug in there, but when it didn’t seem to create the button the fellow was talking about.

Soooooo….I tried clicking on GUVTiles. It required me to lower the divisions back to 1 before I could do that. I did so, and managed to actually click successfully on Col>Txr, but the resulting texture was a complete mess of fragmented images (forgot to grab a screen shot, too busy gnashing my teeth).

*sigh* ANY idea what I’m doing wrong? I really really really want to use Zbrush.

I feel your pain, Virrginia. I experienced this exact same problem in my early zBrush experiments. But as I mentioned a few comments ups, I can’t reproduce the problem to tell you how to fix it. :( I really don’t know why it was happening because I don’t think I do anything different during my process now.

One thing that might help is to load in some zTools that are already set-up correctly for use with 2k’s SculptyMakers converter. Another resident contacted me the other day and this fixed here problem. Let me take a few minutes to save out the properly formatted objects and upload them. I will post a link here soon.

OK. Here are the Sphere, Cylinder, and Plane all set up for use with 2k Suisie’s SculptyMaker convert. I tested these and all 3 work to texture using the zProject PolyPaint method. They will also convert properly when exported as .obj files - at least on my system :)

http://www.shiny-life.com/zBrushTools4SculptyMaker.zip

Give em a try and they might help you get around that mysterious texturing problem.

BTW - for anyone having trouble finding 2k’s converters, you can download them here:

http://www.shiny-life.com/SculptyMakers.zip

Hi Fianna. So glad that you found this tutorial and found it useful as well. :) Have fun sculpting!

Thanks much for the help, Vlad. It still didn’t seem to work, though–although I got a different result this time:

[IMG]http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x85/vtombola/TexturizingBug2.jpg[/IMG]

I’ve started a post about this on the SL Building Forum–perhaps someone there might have an idea.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1950265#post1950265

Okies! It’s working now. Basically, I was losing my UV map. When reloading the tool, don’t enable polymesh–it’s already set for the tool (oh fine, you wouldn’t do that. Well away, *I* did, thinking “if one click on the polymesh button is good, four or five must be even better”).

If you do re-enable the polymesh, it seems to disable the UV. Also, as 2K Susei told me, if you should “disable” your UV, you actually DESTROY it–bye bye UV, must start again.

And that is what happened. All fixed now, onward to more playing about with Zbrush!

This is an Awesome set of tuts for both Sculpties and ZBrush. Unfortunately when i got to the part about utilising the material Baker something rather odd and discouraging happened.

In short I get this really weird error when I start the baker Script from the console.

Unable to open /Create a fileC:\Program Files\Pixelogic\ZBrush3\temp\colormap.PSD

I guess it’s trying to make the shadowmaps but some kind of permissions situation is preventing it from doing so.

That’s The exact format of the Error which I have to admit seems kinda wrong in itself, especially that first part. If anyone has has this (most likely with Vista) would you please be able to shed some light on my situation. A reply here or an Email would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks. Rift

Great tutorial, but where can we find the 2K Susei converter.
THANKS

You can find it on the SL forums:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=1783021&postcount=26

Or download it here:
http://www.shiny-life.com/SculptyMakers.zip

Thank you for the tutorials. I really like the idea of Material Baker.. but I’m having a heck of a time with it. I’m running ZBrush 3.0, and the script starts, flips the prim around a few times, and then unceremoniously crashes Zbrush (deleting my work).

Am I missing something fundamental with the plugin? is there a “special version” for 3.0?

Hi Winter. AS far as I know there is only one version of that Material Baker script. It has never caused my system to crash, although on occasion I end up with a totally black texture instead of the results i expected.

I would try starting with a freshly Initialized zbrush - you can find that option in Preferences. Then load in your object that you want to bake. Might help avoid any odd settings that may effect the script. You might also try re-setting the center of the object before baking, I believe you can press CTRL-P to do that.

Might try doing the rotating and baking with the Manual options instead of the AutoBake buttons, too. Good luck :)

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