I have been working in a spongebob character to try to improve my skills, I am still very green and don’t know what I’m doing half the time, but I have so far created the square sponge part, but whenever I try to append and add in things like teeth and eyeballs, it never works. Here is what I do. I have my main character and all the little things, tie, shirt, pants, merged into the subtool section. I click append and then choose a tooth tool I had made. The tooth pulls up huge, and right in the middle of my spongebob. Once I click on it in the subtool level, and then click on the move function, nothing pops up that would allow me to move the tooth. Then When I click on Scale hoping to downsize it a little it disappears completely as soon as I touch my pen to the tablet. THe subtool says it is still there, but even the little icon on the side of the subtool has disappeared and is never to be found again. I’ve done this over and over and over and it does the exact same thing each time. I even tried to add eyeballs, and it wouldn’t let me, kept making them disappear when I scaled. I shut the system down and when I started it back up it was doing the same thing. I have a macbook pro with oodles of memory and a cintiq. Please help. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I included a picture so you can see that is happening on my screen.
FOr the eyeballs, I ended up having to just inflate the clay while masking around it, which is why they are so lopsided. I tried to get round spheres in as eyeballs, but the same thing kept happening.
Hi, is there anyone in this great big forum who knows what’s going on with my system? I’ve been stalled now for a few days and I have a lot of projects I need to work on. Thanks.
Hi digiclay.
The lack of response is probably because no one understands your problem.
You say you click on scale. That’s the one top left right?
Normally you’d then get to draw an ‘action line’ by clicking and dragging out from the active subtool. But it sounds like you don’t get that far?
Are you using a tablet or a mouse?
G.
I’m not totally understanding the problem either, might be something that happens when using Zbrush on Mac. When I’m adding subtools first I load up my desired OBJ, load my main tool and hit append to select the new subtool. Now it looks like you’re using primitives within Zbrush instead of exported OBJs. Maybe you’re forgetting to hit “Make PolyMesh3d” at the top right palette. When a tool is added to your subtools, it will automatically be snapped to the center unless exported from specific dimesions in a 3d program. Try hiding all other subtools except the one your manipulating. Sometimes it will be way too small or way too big. When it is isolated and you can’t see it, try holding alt and then click once in the 3d space and this will automatically zoom on your object to fit the screen. Hope this helps explain some of the process, I find it best to use premade OBJs anyways. If you’re pretty fluent in a 3d program, I would try exporting your current character into it and simply create your new tools there and export them back into Zbrush. You won’t have to move them at all either, they’ll go right where they were in the 3d program. 
Thanks for the response. I don’t know if it is my mac or what. I use a cintiq to draw, but I’ve found that the zbrush program itself is pretty flaky when I try to use it. When I first tried to work with the tools, I couldn’t get the scale button to work at all, then when I’ve tried recently, it won’t bring up the 3 circles to click that are supposed to scale the thing, (usually this is when I have something to add the subtool to. Seems to work if it is the only thing on the screen.) and when I put my pen to the pad, the tool I want to scale just disappears completely. As you see from the picture, I was trying to add pre-made teeth to spongebob. I had made them and then loaded them in and then tried to append as a new subtool. It would of course pop up in the middle of spongebob, bigger than I wanted it, and so then when I tried to move it, or scale it, nothing worked. and then the scale would crash. once the tool disappeared, even the picture would disappear as a little icon in the tool bar, although the label would remain. As for another 3D program, there aren’t that many that work on macs. I tried Hexagon, but it didn’t work at all on my computer. I have 4G of RAM and I will soon be uploading 2 more G’s of it. Maybe that will fix the problem, maybe it won’t, but it is getting a little annoying that it won’t work right. I can’t even imagine having to do something intricate like I see in the forum with 100’s of subtools, if I can’t even get one to work with something as simple as spongebob. Also, if I have appended a subtool and then click on make polymesh, it is like I hit a reset button and everything disappears. All my tools are gone, subtools, everything and I have to open the system again and reload it from where I last saved it. I save it every 10 minutes now for that reason. There’s no telling what will make everything on my screen just disappear.
Systems using MacBook Pro 17 inch Mac OS X 10.5.6
2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
with a Cintiq 12WX
Wow, I’m not sure why you’re encountering these problems other than your hardware and it being a mac maybe. Seems like you know how to do this process, things are just glitching out I guess. This sounds like something Aurick could help you with better. Look him up and check for similar threads of his. Sorry man, hopefully you can get this resolved. 
Thanks, I’m about ready to reload the software to see if maybe that might work. I guess once I install the 2 extra GB of Ram I’ll reinstall the program as well. I’ve been just playing with it, trying different things for 2 weeks now, and it seems like the same button doesn’t work the same way all the time. Frustrating since the reason I bought this program was to help me with my illustrations. It is a tight learning curve, but there seem to be too many glitches and I’m never sure if this button or that button is actually working the way it should be. I wish I could hear from the makers of the program to see if maybe there are some bugs that only seem to show themselves with mac users. Anyone know who I can talk to about that?