Fixing Seams in Zbrush?

hi

I have no idea how to use zbrush so i really would need to find a step by step tutorial on how to paint and fix seams on clothing, not just painting onto the sl avatar but to load the clothing tga files onto the model.

Does anyone know where i can find a tutorial for this?

Thank You.

Fianna Idora has a nice tutorial on creating a seamless bump map for SL avatars here:
http://slhowto.com/slhowto_zbrush_bake_seamless_bump_sl_avatar.asp

Clothing would use the same principles, except instead of baking shading on and exporting that texture, you would create the clothing texture on the Zbrush model and export that.

To import a texture onto just part of the model (for example, the lower half), cntrl-shift click the part you want, which will hide the rest of the avatar model. Then import the texture and click txr>col (texture to colour) in the texture subpalette of the Tools palette. Now the texture has been translated into pixol colours, and you can proceed with your normal painting techniques in Zbrush.

BTW, I found a wonderful free plugin for Zbrush called Zapp Link, which you may find useful. It allows one to drop the tool to the canvas to work on, much like Projection Master does. The difference is that it exports the a texture to the 2D graphics editor of your choice (e.g. Photoshop), where you can work on it with your Photoshop tools. It's a tad resource heavy, but you might find the ability to use things like the patch tool useful for getting rid of your seams. The thread about it is here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=29628

Zbrush is great for sculpting 3D items - for painting on the avatar I have found it lacking for various reasons.

If you want to fix seams use the AVPainter (about $10 USD) or Bodypaint 3D (more expensive than ZBrush)- those programs work very well if you are just trying to fix little things like wrinkles or making sure a stitch lines up etc. ZBrush would not be my first choice for this, and I have tried very hard to make it work. It is something about the amount of faces in your mesh and then pixel painting on the mesh - it just doesn't work as effectively as AVPainter or BodyPaint.

I'm curious about what problems you've had, Sioux. My principle use of Zbrush has been for sculpting, but I've made a few skins and outfits using it and it worked terrifically. Doing things such as stripes can be tricky (although I had little trouble making nice stripes along the sides of uniform pants)--but my understanding is that is something of an AV mesh issue. There was a thread on this a bit ago, and from what I recall, the best course of action is to using the standard avatar templates from Robin or Chip to doublecheck on alignment. Since one has to finish up in a 2D editor anyway to get rid of the black bit, it's not really a major addition to the workflow.

That said, I used AvPainter for quite a while before I got Zbrush, and for the price it's amazingly powerful. I wouldn't recommend getting Zbrush just for seam elimination--that is a bit akin to getting an oven just so you can make toast.

I just cannot get it to work properly. I can create meshes and sculpt ok - fine. But the Avatar mesh (I have the fixed version - actually several different ones from different people) just doesn't want to cooperate. It may be the way Zbrush works and I just am not used to it. I have issues just getting the texture to go where they are supposed to (UVW mapping and making the things work properly without having to jump through hoops). I've tried pixel painting and projection master - neither work because I get stuck and can't get back to my model (Ok so I'm a little slow). I have viewed several tuts on it and I think that it is just Zbrushes workflow. I am a 3DS Max user and can model some wicked polygonal stuff and organic stuff - the hard way. Texturing has always been a bit of a pain though and I usually find a workaround.

But you are right though - for most people AVPainter is quite adequate. Like I said - if you aren't looking to create skins or whatever and just trying to correct seams etc., get the cheaper program.

I would never use ZBrush to work on existing texture seams that have already been mapped to the SL avatar. I would simply use Photoshop. It has more precise tools.

I use ZBrush for creating skins and clothing primarily as a lunch point for further refinement within Photoshop. In order to get good results out of ZBrush, for seams, you will need modified ZTool models of the avatar mannequins that host a non-overlapping UVW. This will enable you to handle all seams (especially the neck and waist lines) within a single texture file. The higher the resolution the better. I use projection at 4096x4096 to output all three body sections within a single file at 2048x2048 per section. I get good results at that resolution. Still, the seams will require additional work in Photoshop to deal with bleed, symmetry, and blurring inconsistencies between different seam sides in certain areas on the avatar (i.e. the forehead, shoulders, and sides of the neck).

Any other distortions that might get introduced around, shoulders, underarms, or crotch are much more likely the result of the morph targets used to alter the appearance of the avatar's shape inside SL rather than seam problems in the textures. There is not really any way to compensate for all of the permutations that come out of these morph targets. It's just something that we all have to live with by limiting the texture details in those problem areas and testing textures on default avatar shapes first.

Edit: Now that the complete morph targets have just been made available...

http://www.ccccybernetics.com/avatar_databank/

...testing, designing, and baking textures for specific target shapes just became a lot easier.