Hello all, these are a few things that continue to frustrate me about the Zbrush UI that I either cannot seem to figure out, or it was just made broken and the developers do not appear inclined to fix it. Correct me if there is something I am missing about any of these problems, as I would much like to integrate a working solution into my workflow.
First and foremost–scaling. Zbrush appears to have no system for scaling or measurements. I cannot get it to work in real world scale, the scaling is 100% broken 100% of the time when exporting to other applications, and if i import some kind of proxy geometry that IS the right scale and try to measure it by eye off of that, I have to try to align it correctly with the deformations tab which is a pain in the ass, and I don’t even know what units the deformations are based on. A lot of times I can crank the offset to 100 and it barely moves at all. I have to resort on the transpose, which has no way of snapping to the center, which fcks up my geometry or fcks up my symmetry. Which brings me to my next issue.
Transformations. How the f*ck hard is it to integrate just a regular transformation gizmo into zbrush like every other friggin 3D application in the history of applications? I don’t want to use the transpose tool. It is terrible and frustrating to work with. There also seems to be a maximum radius on the transpose tool that i can’t figure out what is tied to. Someone please tell me if there is an external plugin that allows for this kind of manipulation. I’m debating just switching to mudbox for this reason alone.
Dedicated texture channels. Or lack thereof. Every other texture painter has this–Mari, Mudbox, hell, even Bodypaint. Get with the program, Zbrush! There appears to be some sort of specular functionality loosely tied in with the lightcap module, but I can’t figure out how to paint directly into it. Multi-map exporter spits out decent normal and displacement maps, but getting the scale right in an external application when Zbrush always f*cks up the scale anyway is a nightmare, and then I have to adjust them later for the adjusted scale. I still have not figured out how to use the vector displacement maps. Getting anything to look like it does in Zbrush, outside of Zbrush, has always been a pain.
Also, can I scale multiple subtools uniformly WITHOUT having to merge them and destroy and recompute all of my subdivisions, and then break them once again into multiple subtools and remerge the ones that were already comprised of multiple subtools? Lets say i had a chain, wrapped around a characters body. I want to scale the chain and the body, without having to delete the subdivs on both, merge them, scale them up, then break them apart and spend an hour trying to merge every single link in the chain back into one object again. That’s tedious and unnecessary.
I don’t like the fact that everything is arranged alphabetically rather than based on functionality. Its completely unintuitive and hard to find anything. I understand that you can rearrange your layout to better suit your needs, but I just don’t have the time. If someone has saved a better layout, please send me the file.
There are a few reasons I still stick with Zbrush despite all this. UV Master, Zremesher, Zspheres, Zapplink. But I am actively looking for alternatives. It is hard when you are just trying to do simple things and your own application doesn’t want to play ball with you.