Zbrush

- In last week's video, we saw how to save masks as alphas and then turn them back into masks. And it's a really great trick, but it does have some drawbacks. It relies on the model having Uvs laid out which can be an issue if a model is too dense or complex for Uvs. And it also relies on converting the masks to an alpha. And the alpha can be limited by a maximum eight K resolution. Sometimes you need a mask that has more detail than the alpha can hold.In these cases, the solutions is to save the mask to a paint layer.

So let's see how it works. All right, so in this model, it is a 3D scan. If we zoom in here, we can see. If I hit Shift-F to turn on wireframe, that it is way too dense for laying out Uvs. We zoom out again, hit Shift-F to turn off wireframe. So with a model like this, you can go ahead and create masks by holding down CTRL and painting a mask just like you always would.However, if you know that you want to save a mask for later, what I recommend is not painting it as a mask first, but instead creating as paint in a paint layer.

So, let's see how this works. I'm gonna hit CTRL A to mask everything, and then CTRL click in an open area to invert the mask. So we clear that out. All right, let's go into the layers palette,and let's make a new layer. And let's go ahead and name this Mask1. So the layers kind of act like layers in Photoshop, and we could paint directly in to this layer and hopefully later we can convert that to a mask. So let me zoom out a little bit.

So when we created the paint layer, it went right into a record mode. So, everything that we do in this layer is going to be saved on the layer. You could sculpt into it. You could paint into it. And what we want to do is fill this layer with a color because right now it doesn't have any color in it. Now what you might think we would normally do to fill it is go to Color, and Fill Object, but that actually doesn't work with a layer. It's kind of a weird glitch, but what we need to do is just paint it manually. So I'm going to get a nice, dark black color here, and let's switch to RGB mode.

So we're painting with color. And we go full intensity and full size just so we can fill this in. I'm just gonna fill it with black. And maybe we'll go to the back side, just paint it all over. Make sure we're getting everything. All right, now what we can do, now that it's been filled with a color, I'm gonna go back to Color, and Fill Object and fill it with white. It's kind of a strange glitch, kind of a strange work around, but it's what you gotta do.

Okay now that this whole layer is filled with white, what we can do is start painting what we want to have for a mask that we can save for later. I'm just gonna to bring my draw size way down. Maybe bring down my intensity, and let's get a black color again. And we've got the mode set to RGB. You could also get that paintbrush that we made a few weeks back with b + p, get that paintbrush. And now you can just paint black wherever you want a mask to be.

I'm just going to do something quick and dirty. I'm not really going to worry too much about what it looks like, but let's say that this is a really important mask, and I want to make sure this is saved for later. Okay, now that we've painted into this layer, we can click on Record to turn off Record mode. Sometimes you have to click on it a few times before it actually recognizes that you wanna get out of Record mode. And you could even hide the layer, and now that that's hidden, you could go do any other kind of sculpting you wanted. I'm gonna get the move brush out, b+m+v.

Just for demonstration. We could move this around. Change things however you want, and then you could turn that layer back on, and it's still there. Okay, so now let's turn this paint layer into a mask. I'm gonna go down to Masking, Mask by Color, and Mask by intensity. So what this did, is it turned everything that's black into a mask, and everything that's white left it unmasked. Now if we go back to our layers, we hide that paint layer.

We're left with just the mask. Now if we zoom in here, and we wanna make some changes with the move brush, you can see that those masked areas are unaffected. And then we could clear the mask. We hit CTRL A to mask everything, and then CTRL click in an open area to invert that. And then you could continue to work, and if you ever want to bring that mask back again, you make it visible in the layers. Go to Masking, Mask by Intensity.

Go back to Layers, turn off that paint layer. And you're good to work with that mask again.Okay, so this might seem like a little bit of a convaluted method of saving a mask, but it really comes in handy in those instances where you just really need to have a mask saved for later,but you cannot lay out Uvs.

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