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Displacement Map mode breaks polyframe

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey there!

I’m having a weird issue. Every time I use the displacement map “mode” button, my Polyframe icon grays out, and won’t come back until I restart zbrush.

Doesn’t come back when I turn “mode” back to bump/default.
Doesn’t come back on other subtools, or even other tools

Is this a display issue? Zbrush is working perfectly otherwise. Anyone else run into this?

EDIT: Looks like hitting the displacement Mode button turns off quickEdit, which kills the polyframe. Turning quickEdit back on seems to fix things. Weird.

#2

Hi @Lindsey_Robbins

I’ve been looking into your issue. I can reproduce it, but not quite the same way. There are a number of moving parts involved, and it’s easy to be confused as to what is going on.

This is my experience in the program. Use one of the tools that come with Lightbox for testing to rule out any issues specific to your mesh.

When UV mapping the lowest subdivision level and then creating or assigning a displacement map I am able to toggle the “Mode” button back and forth freely. When the button is pressed, it disables Quick Edit Mode and the polyframe mode. When I deactivate the mode button, it re-enables Quick Edit mode and the polyframe mode.

This part is normal.

Where it breaks for me is when I apply the displacement map (“Apply DispMap”) to convert it to real geometry when the “Mode” button is also active. It’s at this point that QuickEdit mode is switched off and doesn’t come back until I manually switch it back on. If I apply the displacement with the Mode button switched off, there is no issue.

Is this your experience? You originally stated that simply switching on the “Mode” button caused Quick edit to become switched off (which again is normal), and that it didn’t come back when you simply switched the Mode button off again.

The QuickEdit mode being disabled and not coming back on by that specific procedure is probably a bug. If your experience differs from mine though, and simply switching the Mode button on causes the issue, there may be another factor.

#3

Hey there!

Thanks for the detailed response. It does indeed come back on when I flip the mode button off as long as I haven’t applied a displacement, however, once I apply the displacement, the mode button is off and quickEdit stays off. If I RE-apply the displacement, and toggle Mode on and off, QuickEdit pops back on.

I’ve added a QuickEdit button to my UI, so it’s not a big deal now that I know what it’s doing. Looks like it might be a bug.

#6

Thanks for the verification @Lindsey_Robbins!

While it’s confusing, the more I look at it I’m thinking this is a feature rather than a bug.

If your goal is to simply deform your existing geometry, you needn’t enable the “mode” button. While the Mode button toggles how that map is displayed when applied to the mesh, it doesn’t affect how that mesh is deformed when the “ApplyDispMap” is pressed. Pressed or unpressed, the actual mesh geometry will deform the same way, even in bump mode, at whatever the active subdivision level is.

What toggling on the Mode button does is switch off Quick Edit mode, which allows Zbrush to display the surface with a virtual subdivision and smoothing effect (This effect can be adjusted in Tool > Display Properties). Applying the Disp map to the geometry with this mode is active applies it with that smoothing active, so Quick edit mode needs to be disabled to maintain that look.

Since this tanks performance and disables sculpting, this would generally be used as a render time effect. You can probably achieve the same quality of displacement by simply subdividing your mesh further, which may be preferable in many cases.

So just disable the mode button prior to applying your displacement to the geometry to avoid the QuickEdit thing. If you want the look of the displacement you see with the “Mode” button pressed in your actual geometry, you can subdivide your mesh further.

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