ZBrushCentral

B button brush selection button broken not working doesn't work

Hi,

I had 2023.0.1 (or whichever version of 2023 there was) until yesterday.
For some strange reason, suddenly out of the blue the B button which by default is used and I use it to select my brushes stopped working.
Nothing happens regardless what I do if I press B on my keyboard or on my display tablet which has the B key assigned to it by default.
Both my keyboard and tablet work fine in everything else. Zbrush just ignores the B button.
I never had any custom shortcuts, ever.
It has always been my favorite method of selecting brushes. Please! Somebody! T_T

I tried:

  • the caps lock issue, nothing changed
  • re-initializing zbrusrh, nothing
  • updated to latest version (2023.2.2), no change

I will now proceed to wipe zbrush completely off my computer and just copy back my downloaded brushes and such because otherwise I have no idea what happened.

The only thing that I did “new” I can imagine is that I instaled the zbrush bridge from Prism, the pipeline sharing tool.

Has anyone else had this issue? If yes, how did you fix it?

I also have 2022.0.7 installed which broke as well.

Yes, everything else works at the moment as far as I’ve tried.

Hi @Yoji

That is not insignificant. What you’re speaking of is neither developed or supported by Maxon or the ZBrush development team. We make no guarantees it won’t cause issues.

That said, please recall that the ‘B’ key is context sensitive and only activates the 3D brush pop up when there is an active 3D tool in edit mode.



Assuming your B key is actually sending the correct ID (different keyboard and language settings can affect the assignments of the keys) you are most likely looking at either a corrupt hotkeys file, or some sort of key conflict on your system with another running program, device, or OS feature.

You can check for the former easily enough by deleting your hotkeys file from your ZBrushData2023 ( or ZBrushData2022 depending on the version) folder.

On Windows this is located at:

C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\ZBrushData2023

On Mac this is:

\Users\Shared. The easiest way to get to \Users is to be in the Finder and click Go at the top of the screen, then Computer in the pull-down menu. Now in the window that opens, double-click on Macintosh HD. You’ll then see Users as one of the folders.

In the ZBrushData2023 folder, navigate to ZStartup/Hotkeys, and move the startuphotkeys.txt file you find there out of the folder to another location. This file will only be present if you have a custom key assignment. Then restart ZBrush.

The next time ZBrush starts, it should start with the default hotkeys. Load a file like the dog.zpr so you have an active 3d tool in edit mode, and see if the B key works again. If it does, then the issue is with with your file, and any custom key assignments will need to be re-created. If it does not, then the issue is not with the configuration file, and you can restore it to the original location.

Otherwise, the B key works as expected in a properly functioning installation of ZBrush. If it does not on your system, it is likely that something else on the system is preventing it from working. This could absolutely be caused by a third party plugin, but also by any other running program, device, or OS feature that is influencing B key behavior.



Please contact ZBrush support for any technical issues with your ZBrush installation. Please be sure to have upgraded to the most recent version of ZBrush available to you so we can be sure you’re not being affected by some sort of issue with the obsolete version.

Thank you!

Thank you very much @Spyndel!

Before I saw your post I actually uninstalled every version I had using Revo uninstaller to be sure I rip out everything “from the root”. So, I’m sorry I couldn’t try the things you mentioned, but!

Uninstalled the Prism plugin ofc which I CONFIRM is the culprit hence my coworker tried it and it had the same effect.

After a clean install of Zbrush my B button came back.

But, if this happens to anyone else after installing the Prism plugin, I can say that you will have to reasign even default hotkeys, sadly, but it will work again. (with the hover over ctrlalt+ assign hotkey option at least)

What happens when you instal Prism that it creates either the file StartupHotkeys.txt in:
ZbrushData2023/Zstartup/Hotkeys
either it creates a line in that file like this:
// >>>PrismStart
[ZPLUGIN:PRISM:GETCOMMANDS,880] // Ctrl+Shift+P
// <<<PrismEnd

Solutions may be any of the things mentioned so far, I guess.