Assign multiple material zones to clothing

simon_2213780

Hi guys

I need some help from you great people out there, I am designing a superhero suit, and I want to have different textures fro different areas of the suit, just like the supersuit has.

My question is, how do I make the suit so the separate material zones show in Daz, I am using Zbrush to model the suit. Is there a way for Daz to recognise the polygroups,

Or any helpful suggestions you can think of?

Thanks a million in advance

Herald of Fire

Okay, long story short you're going to want to use the Polygon Group Edit tool (Alt+Shift+G) and select the faces you want to make into a new surface or assign to an existing one. To help you out with this, you can right-click to get the context menu and select all polygons in a particular surface.

Click and drag to select polygons. If you need to release the mouse button, you can use CTRL + Click to add any polygons to your current selection or click on its own to start afresh. Pressing ALT and clicking will allow you to remove rogue polygons from your current selection.

Once they're all selected, right click and go to Polygon Assignment. Here you can either create a new surface from the selected polygons or add them to an existing surface. Be warned that this will also REMOVE those polygons from whatever surface they are currently on. Polygons cannot belong to multiple surfaces.

Rinse and repeat until your material zones are added.

You can save your finished article as a prop or wardrobe item via Save As -> Support Asset -> [Pick what you need]

Happy modelling!

Edit: Forgot to mention as it wasn't directly important, but if you want to rename your surfaces for any reason, you can do so by going into polygon group edit and opening the Tool Settings pane. Here you can click a surface title and type in a new name. You can also delete any surfaces which have zero polygons in them to tidy things up.

simon_2213780

Thank you for such a great explanation,

Is this the only way? The reason I ask is because my mesh has been decimated to allow Daz to handle it without crashing, my polygons are tiny and it would take forever to select em all, also selecting those polys won't leave a very clean cut, it will have loads of corners and vertices from the polygons.

What would you suggest?

JimmyC_2009

At the end of the day, you would need to select Polys anyway, even to UV Map it? You don;t need to select them one at a time, you can use lasoo and rectangular selection.

Can you not assign Poly groups in ZBrush, or Polygon Selections, or as it is called in Hexagon, Shading Domains? When Shading Domains are assigned in Hexagon, they are displayed and can be selected in the Surfaces pane

Herald of Fire

simon said:

Thank you for such a great explanation,

Is this the only way? The reason I ask is because my mesh has been decimated to allow Daz to handle it without crashing, my polygons are tiny and it would take forever to select em all, also selecting those polys won't leave a very clean cut, it will have loads of corners and vertices from the polygons.

What would you suggest?

The only thing I can really suggest is to add the material zones before you decimate the figure. If you're having trouble getting Daz to load it without crashing, then it's either time for a system upgrade or a clean up.

wancow

http://www.uvmapper.com

You could try using UVMapper as well. You can use that to assign material zones to your mesh.

Jaderail

I'm still very new at the UV mapping and Material Zone thing but I'm pretty sure the Mat Zones must follow the Mesh. If the mesh does not have the proper LINEs (verts) for a clean line the UV Map and Mat zones will also have the jagged edges. It comes down to the way the mesh was created. That is one thing all modelers need to take into consideration at design time.

Herald of Fire

Jaderail said:

I'm still very new at the UV mapping and Material Zone thing but I'm pretty sure the Mat Zones must follow the Mesh. If the mesh does not have the proper LINEs (verts) for a clean line the UV Map and Mat zones will also have the jagged edges. It comes down to the way the mesh was created. That is one thing all modelers need to take into consideration at design time.

Correct. As I mentioned above, each poly can only be assigned to a single surface, so there's no 'seams' across the same polygon. I'd imagine Decimator takes this into consideration when breaking up the models, which is why I suggested applying the material zones before lowering the polygon count.