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Project vanished in one click - why??

Hi - I’m just getting started with zbrush and am having some serious troubles with the UI. I was happily sculpting away for several hours, and then I wanted to add another piece of geometry to the mesh - I had seen people doing that in speed sculpting videos, essentially where they block out the character in shapes and they are all part of the same mesh rather than a bunch of separate subtools - I wasn’t totally sure how to do this, but I thought the most logical thing was to click the subtool button where you select what tool you want to use, similar to when you begin a new project. I clicked the sphere, and boom, all that was on the screen was a sphere. All of my work gone, the only thing remaining in the subtools bar was the original base mesh that I had created with zspheres - no sculpting remained. I tried to undo, but nothing. I went into the quick save files and clicked the newest one, but it was a project I had made when I had downloaded zbrush many years ago as a demo.

What exactly did I do, and why did all of my work disappear without so much as a warning? And what can I do to keep it from happening again? Do I just have to save the project every five minutes and hope I don’t make that kind of mistake again? It seems nonsensical.

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What it sounds like happened, was that you simply switched to another active tool–I’m guessing the polyshpere primitive in the zbrush tool menu?

Undo only undoes changes to the active tool, so there was nothing to undo in this case. Your original tool should still be in the tool menu–find it and switch back to it. Make sure you’re in edit mode (t) to continue working on it.

What you probably saw in videos was an Insert Mesh brush function in action.

Hey Spyndel, I’m having exactly the same problem and am getting very frustrated at Zbrush’s horribly unintuitive and clunky UI.

In my Recent Tools I can see a miniature of the polymesh I was working on, but whenever I open it now, on the canvas all that appears is a single Male_PlanesofHead mesh.

How can it be so easy to trash a project in this way!?
Surely there’s a way to access the polymesh I was initially working on?

Please help! ^^