I’m having some trouble with zspheres… I want to move one of them, but I don’t want to have the gray link between the two zspheres enlarge at the base, I want it to stay the same width it is when I originally select the zsphere to have it move, but I can’t figure out how to do it. I’ve done it before, but I can’t seem to duplicate the move again. Help?
The linking spheres are always scaled in equal increments between the parent and the child. This means that if you have a large parent and a small child, the linking sphere closest to the parent will be just slightly smaller than the parent is. When the ZSpheres are very close to each other, this isn’t too noticeable since there isn’t room to display them all. For example, if there is only enough room to draw one, then ZBrush will draw the one that is half scale. If there’s room to draw three, they will be 3/4, 1/2 and 1/4 scale. But when you move the child farther away, then ZBrush has more room to draw all of them and you’ll see the largest (which is a little smaller than the parent).
This is a natural function of ZBrush, and cannot be eliminated. If you want the chain of linking spheres to all be the same size as the child, then you will need to actually have 3 ZSpheres: The parent, a first child next to the parent, and the child that is moved away.
Bear in mind, though, that if you’re using Adaptive skinning, then the linking spheres are ignored. Adaptive skins are calculated based on the positions, size and hierarchy of the ZSpheres, only. Only Unified Skinning takes the linking spheres into account. In fact, try this: With your ZSphere model in Edit mode, set Tool>Display Properties>Density to 0. All of the linking spheres will disappear. Now press A to activate the adaptive skin preview. Guess what? The skin looks identical to what you had with the default setting of 16. In short, linking spheres are only a visual aid to help you see the relationships between children and parents.
By the way, you can also set Tool>Display Properties>Size to make the ZSpheres and linking spheres smaller in relation to the overall scale of the model.
That was very informative and helpful for a newbie like myself… thank you very much, aurick! 