Total newb question: I’ve watched a hundred tutorials, but nobody ever says how to control the severity of smoothing. In other words, if I hold shift and drag on a mesh, it always seems to smooth quite quickly, making it hard to get more subtle smoothing. It doesn’t seem to respond to me changing ‘z intensity’ before doing the smooth. Am I missing something?
Thanks for the help,
-Ben
Switch to the Smooth brush and change the Z Intensity setting there. Then ZBrush will use that setting any time you activate the brush via Shift. Basically, ZBrush doesn’t use the current brush’s Z Intensity setting; it uses the Smooth brush’s current setting. The reason for this is that Shift doesn’t just turn on a smoothing feature. It temporarily activates the Smooth brush itself, of which Z Intensity is just one part.
Hope that helps.
I noticed that the smooth intensity is unaffected when in zsub. I can only seem to get smoothing to work properly (intensity mainly) when the zadd toggle is active.
Ah, you’re right, this did work. Sort of. Doesn’t seem like this is a very consistent control, as I work with it – but it definitely helps me for now. Thanks so much!
-Ben
I can get this, but I have to do it every time I open zbrush 3.1. I know of how to save the config (Control+Shift+I), but it never sticks!
Can anyone help?
I prefer not to smooth too much. I’m still unexperienced in ZB, and Ryan Kingslien with his great tut on his sandpaper brush gave me the desire to experiment as I wanted a smoother step, so here’s what I do:
I open the alpha pallette on the left and the brush pallette on the right
I take the standard smooth brush and add alpha 24
in the brush pallette I set the brushmod to -26
in the alpha pallette I give the curve a bit of a curved slope
with the curve and the U (z intensity) and S (brushsize) shortcuts, I tweak the brush for more or less detail.
A small brush size and a low z-intensity can work like very fine sandpaper. And just like with very smooth sandpaper, you have to rub the surface several times to get a more visible result.
The simply save the brush from the brush panel, and it’ll always be available.
Here’s the brush.
Save it to the startup folder / brush presets (program files, pixologic, blahblah).
Thank you very much for your help Erik…and the brush. I have found that I can save a brush but it’s still strange I can’t alter a default brush and save it. But now it doesn’t matter so much.