ZBrushCentral

Default brush icons location

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi! I’ve slowly creating my own Zbrush Custom UI and recently decided to change the hotkeys of my most used brushes to numbers. However, I’d like to put those numbers in the brush icons so I don’t forget which one is which, and found an #askzbrush video about it.
However the video never mentions where the default brush icons are located so one could add the numbers as was asked, only how to create a new one. I tried looking up icons in the Zbrush files but only gound the sample image and outdated icons without black backgrounds.

Is it possible to find the default Zbrush icons so that I may add numbers to them? If so, where are they located? I searched through nearly all .psd files in the zbrush files but I couldn’t find the actual icons.

#2

Hello @DarkiDarki ,

The icon is saved on a per brush basis and loads when that brush file is loaded. Custom made brushes do not load with the program by default. If the custom brushes are placed on a custom UI they will not appear until they are actively loaded into a session. Your recommended options are:

  1. Store your custom brush with the custom icon in the Lightbox folders and load them on demand.

  2. Add the brushes to the ZBrush 2022\ZStartup\BrushPresets folder so that they will load at startup. You can then assign a hotkey to those brushes. Try to reserve this only for brushes you will be using every session as this has performance implications for ZBrush. More situational brushes should be loaded on demand.

A note on this–it is recommended to use the three button combo system for brushes as described in the hotkey documentation. There is simply not enough single press keyboard real estate available for a substantial selection of brushes, and there is a lot of hard-coded functionality related to modifier keys that can produce conflicts with brush-related functions.

Good luck!

#4

Sorry, it seems there’s some confusion. What I’m looking for is the brush icon images for the default Zbrush brushes (ie. Standard brush, ClayBuildup, Inflate, DamStandard, etc). What I want to do is add numbers to these icons as was asked in the following video: #AskZBrush: “Is it possible to display the shortcut for a brush on its icon?”
However, said video only showed how to make new brush icons, rather than how to find and modify the already existing default zbrush brush icons, which was what was being asked.
Is it possible to find the image files of the zbrush icons? I think it would help a lot with customizability. I already tried looking into the Zbrush files but only found old and outdated icons.

#5

As I said, the brush icons are stored in the brush files themselves. In that tutorial video Joseph didn’t modify an existing icon, he created a new one. I’m not aware of any location where the brush icons are stored independently of the brush files. In order to modify one you would need to screen capture it, modify it, then create a new custom brush using that modified icon.

#6

Ah, I understand. I tried screen cap but the brush icons inside zbrush are slightly cropped and don’t have a black background, not to mention they’re usually at a low resolution and have the brush names obscuring part of them, which makes this much harder to do if one wants a decent quality icon. I guess I’ll have to try to recreate them from scratch.

A resource in which one could download these images or a way to extract image data from the default .zbp files would be great for customizability.

Thanks for your response!