Thank you, Upham.
It wasn’t easy to create the ZScript, since I hadn’t even messed with them before. I’m sure that any future ones will be somewhat more refined, now that I’ve had this learning experience under my belt.
As far as the process was concerned, I started out by creating the entire scene in one recorded session. I then went back with Wordpad and analyzed what made the Picnic tutorials work the way that they did. It was then a matter of reading through my recorded script to find the logical breaks in each segment and insert the comments/commands that make it all work. I did this last part side by side with ZBrush, making and saving changes with the text editor and then reloading the script in ZBrush to make sure that it was doing what I wanted it to do. (Which unfortunately did not happen nearly often enough! LOL)
The worst was when I accidentally said “FindButton” instead of “ButtonFind”. This was after the very long stretch that draws the tree’s needles and had the effect of essentially blowing the entire script up on me. In ZBrush, the script switched to its full text mode (like it always does when there’s an error), but instead of showing the error in red like usual, it just suddenly stopped displaying about halfway through the process. I was just about ready to chuck my computer out the window when I figured out what I’d done. Then I wanted to chuck myself out the window for having made such a simple mistake. LOL
Anyway, it all worked out in the end, and I have an idea for a really sweet tutorial surprise in the near future. It’s going to take a lot of work to create, though, so you’ll have to be patient.