I decided I'd make a quick tutorial on using a custom matcap in Blender. There aren't too many matcaps in Blender at this point, and sometimes the available matcaps just don't do the trick for what you need to do. I'll show you 2 methods of getting your own custom matcaps. So, without further ado, here's how to do it!

1. If you want to use a preexisting matcap, the best place to go is probably the ZBrush matcap library. Pixologic gives out lots of matcaps used in ZBrush for free. The only catch is that the matcaps are all .ZMT files. As far as I know, these are only recognized by ZBrush. I haven't found out a way to extract the image from these, so we'll use a workaround. Assuming you want to look there, here's the link: pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadc…

2. Find a matcap that you like. For this tutorial, I'm using the "rusted grey metal" material.

3. When you click on one of the matcap previews, an image will appear showcasing the matcap. You can right click on that image and choose "open image in new tab". Right click this new image and click "save image as" and pick a directory on your system.



4. Open the image in GIMP.


5. Select the Crop tool and change the aspect ratio to 1:1 and check "Fixed".


6. Drag a selection box around the sphere, making sure that nothing else is in the crop box.


7. Hit enter and save the image as a .png file.

8. Finally ready to use the image in Blender! First off, make sure that you're using Blender Internal instead of Cycles. This is mandatory, so it doesn't matter how much you dislike BI, you have to use it.


9. Add a new material to the object that you'll be sculpting on. Make sure to set the material type to shadeless otherwise the material will show up black in the viewport.


10. In the textures tab, add a new texture, set the type to "Image or movie" and open your matcap sphere image. Set the image mapping to "Normal".


11. All that's left is to change your viewport shading to Material.

12. Enjoy your custom matcap.

Because the textures are low resolution, there can be visual glitches when using them. I found this out the hard way. I'll make sure to update this journal entry when/if I find out how to extract ZMT files.