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Transpose awkward shapes - best Zbrush workflow

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Something I really appreciated about using 3DCoat was their very intuitive transpose tool. I was quickly able to reshape specific areas of awkward shaped meshes easily like this:

I have tried using the move gizmo tool, as well as the transpose tool, and also the deformer palette in the move gizmo settings but none of them seem to let me work with the mesh in the way that I want to like above.

My question is, what is the closest Zbrush workflow to the above shown, that will allow me to scale and flatten, and fatten, and bend irregular objects over specific regions, like that?

#2

Hello @arumiat ,

I don’t see anything in that video that the Gizmo manipulator doesn’t do. What exactly are you having trouble with?

To get the most out of transpose functions, you need to know how to quickly reposition it exactly where you want it, and you need to know how to isolate the geometry you want to affect and only that geometry. The latter is done with masking, polygroups, and visibility shortcuts. If these functions aren’t committed to muscle memory, then many things in ZBrush will be more difficult. Soft transitions in manipulator falloff can be achieved with mask-blurring.

Lower poly topology is generally much more forgiving both in terms of ease of component selection, and resistance to distortion. The more points there are, the more sensitive to surface distortion the mesh will be.

Additionally, If you watched any of the new feature streams from the Summit, you may have seen that in an upcoming version of ZBrush we will be adding influence falloff based on the Focal Shift slider to the Gizmo manipulator. This may help you get softer transitions without the need to mask-isolate the points.

Good luck!

#3

Thank you as always @Spyndel. I went back and played more with the Gizmo and masking and I was able to get closer to what I was looking for, although the 3Dcoat version is especially nice in terms of getting exactly the transition that you want.

The upcoming influence falloff sounds very exciting indeed, thank you for pointing that out!