ZBrushCentral

How to delete/remove unneeded alphas?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello,

How do I clear/remove an alpha that I no longer need or want to have in the alphas panel? I’m not talking about the default ones.

For example let’s say I keep making alphas in PS. I import them, but I don’t like it, so I go back to PS to modify it. Import it again. Etc, etc. This way the imported alphas just keep piling up in the alpha palette. Even worse, because I’m experimenting, the alphas are hard to tell from each other. So if I make an alpha in PS, import it, and I end up not liking it, I’d like to delete it before I import another.

Same thing happens when I do a grab doc. The alphas are keep piling up and it would be nice to remove the ones I don’t want.

The alphas will clear once I restart ZBrush, but that’s a pain to keep doing. Is there a way to do this without constantly restarting?

Thanks.

#2

In the Alpha palette, Click the ‘R’ button (Restore Configuration) . This will remove all the ones you added, except the active one.

#3

Thanks, but that doesn’t seem to work in the way I “expected”. The ‘R’ just simply reduce the ‘clutter’ but it doesn’t remove unneeded alphas. Here’s what I’m doing.

  1. Sculpt something.
  2. Open the alpha tool popup container thing, and click the button “GrabDoc”. Now you have an alpha labeled “ZGrab01”
  3. Assign this alpha to, say, the standard brush. Now if you look in the alpha tool/popup container, you have 2 alphas. One is the “ZGrab01” and the other is a copy of it, called “BrushAlpha”.
  4. Sculpt something again with whatever brush/alpha combo and do a GrabDoc again.
  5. Now you have 3 alphas: ZGrab01, ZGrab02, and BrushAlpha.

Now go to the Alpha palette menu and click the ‘R’. The alphas that you created will be “cleared up” in the Alpha palette menu (so only one will be visible) BUT if you open the alpha tool container, the 3 alphas are still there! So none has been removed.

And obviously if I do 24 GrabDoc’s, then there will be 24 unneeded alphas accumulated in the tool palette.

#4

Unfortunately there is no way to clear out the Alpha palette other than by restarting ZBrush. As you have found out, the Restore button will remove the alphas from the palette but not the pop-up. The Texture palette operates in the same way. I’ve no idea why.

The only way to load an alpha into ZBrush and it not end up in the Alpha palette is to import it into the Tool>Displacment Map sub-palette by clicking on the thumbnail and choosing Import from the pop-up. But I don’t suppose that’s much use to you.

#5

Thanks Marcus!