- As we have seen, Polypaint places color
on the vertices of a model, or the points.
Now that we have a UV map, we can transfer color
from points to a 2D map and back again.
So let's see how.
Okay, let's go down to UV Map,
and what we need to do first is set the resolution
for the texture map we want to create.
Now, by default, it's a 4K map,
or a little over 4000 pixels square.
Now to really demonstrate what this is doing,
I'm gonna start out with a really low resolution map,
like 512.
Now, to create the texture map,
let's go down to Texture Map,
and come down to Create, and New From Polypaint.
Okay, you can see what it did is
it took that Polypaint information and it put it
into a 2D texture map.
So let's zoom in and see what happened.
Now, there's a couple issues here.
One is that when we created this texture map,
we had the model in a low-subdivision state.
So that meant we were only seeing
a small amount of the detail.
And two, we had a low-resolution texture map,
so you can see, if we zoom in close,
we've got the polygons of the 3D model,
if I hit Shift + F to turn on wireframe.
You see we've got the polygons of the model,
but we're seeing the pixels in the texture map.
So let's make this look a little bit nicer.
I wanna hit "d" a few times,
go up to a higher subdivision level,
all the way up to the highest subdivision level,
and let's create New From Polypaint again.
Okay, so we just made a new texture map,
and it's now using that higher resolution Polypainting.
So you can see it's still pixelated,
but it got more of that detail.
Now let's make a higher-resolution texture map.
If we mouse over this right now,
you can see it's actually popping up this thing
that tells us that it's a 512-resolution map,
so let's go to UV Map and let's set this
to something like a 4K map.
And back to Texture Map,
let's zoom in so we really see this change,
and let's click New From Polypaint.
Okay, so now you can see, if we mouse over this,
you can see it's a 4K map, and also,
much more of that detail is coming through.
You have to zoom in really close before you see the pixels.
So depending on what you're working on,
you might need to experiment
to see what resolution of texture map works best.
Sometimes, a texture map of a 4K might be overkill,
and way more than you need and just using up
more processor and RAM than you really have to.
Other times, you might even need to set this higher.
You might have to drag the slider
all the way up to an 8K map.
So when you're working with textures in Polypaint,
you're going to probably want to switch back and forth
between Polypaint mode and texture mode
depending on what you're doing.
So to do that, you want to turn texture mode on and off.
So if we turn off texture mode,
it's going to switch back to Polypaint mode.
As long as Colorize is turned on.
If we turn off Colorize as well, it's just going to show us
the regular model without Polypaint and without texture map.
And in this mode, you can actually change the color here
and it will update automatically,
even if there's Polypaint filled into this model.
So we turn on Colorize.
Now we can see, the Polypaint, now just to make it obvious
which one we're looking at, I'm gonna paint on something
to just make that obvious.
Let's get a smaller draw size here.
And I'm just gonna paint on a "P" for Polypaint.
And so if we go to Texture Map and turn texture on,
you can see now we're seeing the texture map,
and now we're seeing the Polypaint.
So, we just took Polypaint and turned it into a texture map.
We can also go the other direction.
So if we click on the swatch here,
we could import our own texture map
from anywhere on the hard drive,
or we could just pick one that comes here with ZBrush.
So, I don't know, let's pick the globe.
And now we could actually take this texture
and convert it into Polypaint.
So if we go into the Polypaint palette
and click Poly Paint From Texture,
What it's going to do is it's going to apply that.
Now you'll notice we're sort of getting
a semi-transparent effect.
This is because RGB intensity was down low.
So if we raise that up to 100 and click that again,
we'll get a 100% transfer of that texture into Polypaint.
So now you can see, if we go down in our subdivision levels,
that color is actually being defined now by Polypaint,
rather than the texture.
So let's go back to the texture of the bull,
so I'm just going to hit Ctrl + Z a few times
to go back to the point where it was
before I applied that globe texture to the bull.
So finally, let's see what we need to do
if we wanna get this texture
exported out to another program.
It's a little bit complicated,
but you would go and click on Clone Texture.
So what this does is it takes the texture map,
and it transfers it from the texture map swatch
over to the brush texture.
And now we can export it from the Texture menu.
So under Texture, go to Export,
and then you could save this on your hard drive
in any of these formats.
Okay, so now that you know how to convert
between texture map and Polypaint,
you could bring in a texture map
that was made in another program,
and then edit it in ZBrush,
and then export it back out again.