Introduction to Projection Painting

 

First things First, you will need to obtain good source images for your project.
You will need flat even lighting and large format, high quality images. If you decide to download these, there are excellent samples availbe (For fee) on www.3d.sk.
If you are taking your own photos, I recommend daylight on a foggy SF day:

Or set up your own lights in a Studio:


Take MANY photos, from many different angles. For my models, I usually take 20-30 photos
at different bracketed exposures at 300 dpi with a high quality digital camera.



From there you can UV your model. I suggest UVing in Maya or Headus to produce
minimal UV border edges, My UV layout looks like this:



Once the Model is completed in maya with ALL quads, you can import into Zbrush.

 

Steps before the Projection Master
1. Import your image using the texture library or under the texture palette.
2. Under texture, with your photo selected, choose cropandfill
3. turn off the texture and select your ztool head
4. Draw it out on the canvas and enter edit mode.
5. Under transform-enable the dots display, wireframe so that you can see your photo underneath the head to line it up better.
6. line up the head with the photo.

7. Hit Ctrl-N or Layer-Clear to clear the photo out of the background

8. Divide the model so it isn't very polygon-ized (if it was still low poly).
9. make a new 4k texture, with white as the background color.
10. Enter the projection master. Make sure that Colors and Fade are checked, but nothing else, and hit Drop Now.

Steps in the Projection Master:
1. Enter projection master.
2. Choose flat color material (its the white surface shader).
3. Make sure no texture is in the texture slot.
4. Go to Texture palette--image plane

5. choose your image from the file destination (not like final destination the movie).
6. Hit Ok, and the image plane will be loaded.

10. choose the move tool
11. Turn off the dots display if it was on under the transform palatte.
12. Go to Tool-Geometry and divide the image plane TWICE. This will make sure that there are enough verticies
here to allow you to directly select the image plane's points, and not accidently through the image plane which
could cause accidental rotation of the image.

13. Use the move tool to edit the image on top of the model. Zoom in on the document if needed.

14. When done, pick up from the projection master, and the photo should be applied to your blank texture.

Steps out of the Projection Master:
1. Flip the new texture vertically, and hit texture-export. Save it as a PSD for later
2. make a new clean white texture and start the process again.

You will need to do this same process with each side you project onto. And on each side a new texture will
be created. You need to export each of these textures and combine them in Photoshop. You might get
something like this (4k texture map):

Don't forget to Flip Vertically since Zbrush and Maya view textures differently.