Zbrush and Zscript Question

Hi I've been teaching myself Zbrush 2 on a Mac. Thanks Vlad and Virrginia for the tutorials...couldn't have done it without you even though I can't follow everything you are doing on 3.1! What I've been doing up to now is creating the tool in Zbrush and then exporting as an .obj and opening in AC3D to create the sculpt map. Then I open the .obj again in Lightwave to bake light and shadows and then that gets combined with the fabric texture or whatever in Photoshop... a lot of programs for one little sculptie!

Anyway, so I can get a sculptie (not a gorgeous one yet but a sculptie all the same!) into SL, but when I came across the threads about Zsculpty and MaterialBaker, I figured that would make things so much easier. However, I can't get either of them to work. They load just fine into Zbrush, but when I try to use them, I always get an error message about not being able to find an Interface. Is there some important step I am missing or do these not work for Mac and/or Zbrush 2? I'm pretty sure MaterialBaker said it was written for Zbrush 2...

Any help or just letting me know I should stop banging my head against this wall would be much appreciated! And thanks 2K for the plugin even though I have yet to be successful with it.

Glad that you are finding the tutorials useful, even though they are for v3 of zBrush.

Are you using v1 or v2 of Material Baker. I think v1 is made for zBrush 2 and v2 needs zBrush 3.

Material Baker v1 : http://www.davidikeda.com/zscripts/materialbaker.html

I'm pretty happy with the Material Baker results, but they are not perfect by any means. In most cases there is at least 1 seam, glitch or problem area on the texture when using Material baker because of the way it builds the texture by combining several 'snapshots' of your object. If you are getting nice, accurate texture bakes via Lightwave then it might be worth the xtra step.

Thanks for responding, Vlad. Yes, I'm using v1 of Material Baker. Perhaps I won't
worry about that one after all. Sounds like the results in Lightwave are worth opening the extra program.

If I had Lightwave, I doubt I would use Material Baker. Frankly, it's fairly clunky, crashes even in 3.1, and requires a bit of time in Photoshop cleaning and retouching afterwards.

That said, if you want to try baking in shadows with an older version of Zbrush, you might be best off just using Projection Master. Sylvia Trilling put together a nice tutorial on how to do that. Again, you'll need to go into Photoshop to fix things after, but at least you won't need to fuss with a zscript:

http://www.throughlinedesign.com/ZbrushBakeTut/page1.html

Thanks, Virrginia. I had found Sylvia's tutorial, but it did seem like more work than Lightwave. I guess I'll just stick with what I've been doing.

Hi Betty!,

I don't think ZSculpty works with ZBrush 2. Then again, you're the first person I've met that's tried.

Ahh...ok. Thank you, 2k. I don't think I've ever seen a program where an incompatible plug-in/script would load perfectly but just not work. At least now I can stop trying and thinking it is something I am doing wrong, and I do have other options.

i'm special.

oh hehe... I didn't mean your script... just Zbrush in general. Material Baker loads too, but I have a feeling since it says it is for Zbrush 2 that it's being on a Mac that is the issue? The error messages are so similar that it seems like they both must just be incompatible. I came across a screenshot on Zbrush Central today of an error message with a plug-in incompatible with Zbrush 3.21 for Mac and it was saying pretty much the same thing as the messages I'm getting.

Ah mac!!

Yep, I'm afraid there's a Windows dll that comes with ZSculpty and it's probably the dll that's causing the issues.

If there's any crazy millionaires out there that's willing to buy me a nice shiny macbook air then I'll make ZSculpty for mac too.

Are you rich and crazy, Betty?

Well... being pregnant, I might be a little crazy at the moment, but certainly not rich.

OMG! Congrats! I mean, on the baby thingee. Not the crazy thing--we're all mad here. It's more or less a given.

Thanks, Virrginia! hehe... the crazy isn't too bad. It mostly manifests itself in an insane urge to eat Big Macs 24/7!

Yeah, congrats, Betty!

But wait...

It's not a prim baby is it?. and maybe prim burgers?

Thanks, 2k! No... hahaha! A RL baby! Although, I saw a blog post about an avi that had been pregnant in SL for eight weeks and was going to deliver that Thursday, and I was rather envious. I could have had my baby almost three times by now if that were possible in RL!