ZBrushCentral

Shift + B mystery

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’m a ZBrush novice, so if this is a dumb question, please bare with me.

For much of what I need to do in zbrush I only use maybe a dozen brushes, which means for the most part I use hotkeys to select them. This means I am often pushing B to open the brush window. Also, since zbrush uses the shift key heavily, I have accidentally pushed shift+b before. This enters some sort of draw mode that I can’t find any information on when I search for it, and I was previously unable to continue editing my model. I had to reload the last quicksave point and hope I hadn’t lost too much progress, until I figured out how to fix it. The fix is: Clear the canvas, then drag rect the model back onto the canvas, then hit edit.

This used to work perfectly in 4r7, but now that I am in 4r8 I have encountered some problems. First, sometimes it won’t be an up-to-date version of the model, and will instead be a slightly older version, meaning I lost some of my work, which is in effect the same thing as loading the most recent quick save point. The second problem is that some of my brushes will suddenly have the settings drastically changed for no reason. An example is the Dam_standard brush, which i use a lot. When I re-drag the model onto the canvas and hit edit, suddenly Dam-standard is in Zadd mode instead of Zsub, the stroke has changed, and there is no alpha. Even when I do change the stroke back, the Dam_standard brush won’t work like it’s supposed to, drawing in a line of dots instead of a smooth line. I haven’t tried editing the spread of the dots, maybe that would fix it.

The most frustrating thing is that it is extremely inconsistent: sometimes an older version of the model will drag, sometimes it will be an up to date version. Sometimes the Dam_standard brush will be affected, sometimes it won’t be. I suspect that this is because whatever brush I happened to be using when i accidentally hit shift+b is now the brush I’m using to drag the model back onto the canvas, but I don’t know.

Is there a different/better way to fix this? What is the shift+B funtion, and is there a way to disable it?

Many thanks to whoever can help

#2

This is very odd. I don’t know what’s happening or why the Shift+B hotkey should have this effect. I’ll look into it.

Meanwhile, you can stop the behaviour by assigning the hotkey combo to something else. If you’d rather it did nothing at all then assign it to something like the TotalPoints count that’s at the top of the interface, right of center.

  1. Hold Ctrl+Alt and click on the button.
  2. Press Shift+B to assign the hotkey.
  3. Be sure to press Preferences>Hotkeys>Store before closing ZBrush.

EDIT: I’ve found what the shortcut does. It presses the “Bake” button in the Layer palette. This is rather an old technique related to ZBrush’s 2D capabilities.

#3

Thanks for the help. I’m weirdly gratified to see that there wasn’t a really obvious answer. Reassigning the hotkey to total points count and storing it works like a charm. Thanks again!