How do you export textures when using SubTool Master in Zbrush?

Help!
Okay I finally got the Sculpty Rezzer to work right and my sculptmaps imported into SL perfectly (thanks Vlad and 2K
But now I can't figure out how to convert my polypaint to a texture I can export because now I have a merged object and I can only get one texture to cover all the subtools and it looks bad.
What do I do now? I'm sure it has something to do w/ Zbrush only being able to show one texture at a time, so what happens when I've polypainted my merged subtool so that everything looks right and now I need textures exported?
Hope I didn't miss anything that was already mentioned, I looked here and through the Zbrush forums but can't find the answer to this one.
The Zbrush tut on Subtool master didn't go over what to do w/ polypaint to get it out as a texture.
Anyone have any idea?
thanks in advance!!!
~Violain Villota

By the way, I did try to "split into group" from the subtool menu (not the Subtool Master menu, was that the problem?)
And tried to click on each part individually, but once I get to a certain tool, it activates the visibility of all of them so that I can't get that one tool to show all by itself.
Does that make sense?
Am I supposed to be going back to the Subtool Master for this part too?

I think the best thing to do would be to texture the subtools separately, from a copy that was made before you merged 'em. I think that mergin them and then splitting them might mess up your UV maps. * not sure about this...need to experiment a bit.

BTW - if you use the zSculpty plugin you don't need to merge the subtools before exporting to sculptmaps. zSculpty will create maps for all the separate subtools automatically.

I will experiment with merging the subtools, texturing, then splitting em. Would be sweet if it could be made to work that way.

Actually I believe that when you have subtools and use the Tool/Texture/Col-Tex button only the active subtool is transfered to the texture. Its the same when using Material Baker, only the active subtool is transfered to the texture. However on the model it will appear as if it has messed up the other subtools. This is because for some odd reason Pixologic chose to only allow ZBrush to display a single texture at a time. Just export the active subtools texture and switch to the next subtool you want to work with and turn the texture off and all is good.

Yeah, that's how I have been dealing with subtool texturing, Myhrrhleine. I think the one teexture at t time thing comes from the old days of zBrush when it was more of a painting tool than a modeling tool. I am going to experiment with merging then splitting the subtools though. would be awesome to be able to texture the object as a whole and still get individual textures.

The best way is to use ZSculpty. With ZSculpty you no longer need to merge your object with SubTool Master. You just polypaint your SubTools and then enable the 'Texture' button in the ZSculpty panel and hit 'Export'. ZSculpty will then go through converting all your polypaint into textures and saving them into the ZSculpty Maps folder.

Easy peasy!.

Sweet.

I just did a quick test. It is possible to merge the subtools, paint the entire object, then split it back up and get individual textures for each subtool/sculpty. I'll experiment a bit more and make this my next tutorial.

Here's what I did:

1) Used the Subtool Master plugin to merge all the subtools into one object. I checked the discard option since I had the original saved.

2) Subdivided the geometry up like 5 levels. Ended up with about 2 million polygons. Might need to go up even higher with an object that has many parts.

3) Used the PolyPaint method to paint on the entire merged object. No textures on the object, just painting on the faces. The ImagePlane plugin comes in very handy here.

4) Used the Grp Splt option in the SubTool menu to recover all the original SubTools. Apparently this preserves the original UV maps, which is just what we need.

5) Select one subtool object, use the Col>Txr to create a texture map from the colored polys.

6) Export that texture for use with that subtool.

7) Remove the texture (select Texture Off from the Texture menu on left side)

Repeat steps 5 -7 for each of the other subtools.

This method seems to preserv the Subdivisions levels on the Subtools as well.

This will make it much easier to line up the seams on multi tool objects! If you need to use the 2.5D painting tools you can still go in and swap out the textures for each subtool to paint on them individually.

Schweet, that'll save all that mucking about with the textures Merging them is still a nice option since it makes it easier to line up the textures across the objects.

So does the texture export on zSculpty only work with PolyPaint method, or will it export a texture applied to an object as well? I have been exporting all my textures manually, cuz I get corn-fused when trying to export 'em with zSculpty.

Yep, this is what I sometimes do.

But no need for steps 5-8 with ZSculpty. It knows all about polypaint and will convert and export all the textures for you.

The 'Texture' button only works with polypaint. So any texture already applied would be ignored.

For each SubTool, ZSculpty creates a new texture, jumps to the tool's highest Subdivision level, does a Col>Txr and then exports the texture to the ZSculpty Maps folder.

excellent. Thanks for the clarifications, 2k. No wonder I was getting confused, I didn't realize zSculpty was looking for Polypaint colors.

"Now we know...And knowing is half the battle"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KXCD5BQiM4

Awesome! Wow Zsculpty will make it MUCH easier, thank you!!!!

Now another question - if I use Zsculpty to export and simultaneously turn all polypaint to textures, what about baking in material and shadows?
Would I have to go the route of doing a texture for each seperate subtool then if I wanted shadows baked in or is there a way around it?
Sorry, but sometimes the answers just lead to more questions
~Violaine

Material and shadow baking is where ZBrush falls apart. I personally bake shadows and materials into the polypaint of all my SubTools. But it's far from easy.

There's a couple of material baking scripts around.

Material Baker V1 will bake shadows into a texture. But be warned - it has serious issues when working with SubTools.

Material Baker V2 lets you bake shadows directly into the polypaint but it doesn't have an AutoBake option like Baker V1.

Finally, you could do it manually using Projection Master. If you have the Colorize button enabled when using Projection Master it'll transfer the material and shadows to the polys, rather than to a texture.

I've used the Projection Master method on a few occasions and just baked the front and back of my SubTools. I then have to manually paint over the seams. It's really tedious though. I've considered killing myself on a number of occasions while using this option.

I've tried the V2 Material Baker but nothing happened, I"ll have to look over all the instructions for that again.
Is there a tutorial for the Projection Master method you're talking about 2K, if I can't get the Material Baker script to work?
Again thanks you guys for all the help! It's so frustrating having this completed thing in Zbrush and not being able to fully get it out and into SL!