ZBrushCentral

Plugin/suggestion requests

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’m pretty new here and I don’t claim to have found the limits of the software, but I have come up with a few ideas which I think would be helpful…perhaps some of them could be implemented with zscripts, and if they are, let me know

1 - A button to normalize mesh density. Some meshes require lots of sculpting in certain areas and less sculpting in other areas. The areas where the sculpting takes place end up having much lower polygon density because the polygons are getting shifted around from the smooth shape. Increasing the mesh density becomes necessary at these levels much sooner than it would be necessary on a relatively smooth part. I can’t subdivide beyond level 7 with my computer…but I could handle a lot more overrall detail if I could say “normalize density” and it would simply divide the polygons where the polygon area was greater than a certain threshold which could be set by the user, or automatically calculated so that the overrall polygon density would be normalized. It seems that this COULD be done to a very poor extent currently by modelling everything down to a good level of detail, then going down 1 subdivision and making a Cage, and then modelling the detail ALL over again…but this wouldn’t be fun.

2 - At higher mesh resolutions, the smoothing modelling tool becomes less and less effective because there are more polygons being enclosed by the same brush size…it would be nice to be able to do some more intense smoothing at the higher subdiv levels…perhaps if the smoothing intensity was magnified as the mesh resolution was increased? i dont know if this could be zscripted or not because it would require making the smoothing value go beyond the value of 100

3 - I’d like to have a color palette of brushes/alphas for use with projection master. I do one angle but then it’s difficult to remember all the exact brushes etc to get the same effect on a different angle. A little storage palette would be GREAT. I’m SURE this can be zscripted! Does it exist already? When I learn how I will make this if its not already made…

#2

Lets start with getting the SDK released, as advertised to be a part of Z2 :wink:

#3

  1. you can selectively mask areas you need more density at…mask area you want more in then go to tools>masking invert then divide away.

  2. it seems kindof a pain in the ass but its better to go down in subdlevels and smooth there first using lower intensity smooth and building up. if you really messed up…look up the morph brush usage …there is a good tip about this from I think Mestela…but you’ll probably have to do a search to find his step by step.

  3. unless you quit a session or use initialize…you alphas are ready for you as well as the brushes you used and their settings if you open their menus…no big thing…
    now if you quit inbetween…am not sure if saving the document saves all that or not…do a quick experiment to see…i usually gotta close myself out of the loop at this time of year cuz kids are more important than saving some silly work I did so have never tried the save document thing.

#4

aminuts,

thanks for your response…that helps a lot! I didnt notice the SysPallete brings up a place where I can define custom colors so thats how i can keep consistent color use.

#5

OK, but when I do this…I can no longer use the higher/lower resolution buttons! Which means I can’t skin it or make a disp map from it which makes it pretty useless! Or is there some way around this?