ZBrushCentral

zb4 invert smooth doesn't work

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi,

I work with a smooth brush modifier of -80 so i can smooth only convex surfaces when i smooth and only concave surfaces with i inverse smooth. In zbrush 4, i can no longer hold shift + alt to inverse smooth. When i click on the model to begining inverse smoothing, the cursor doesn’t move. Nothing happens. I really rely on this in my workflow. Is there a workaround or solution for this problem?

if i manually click zsub it will smooth negatively correctly but, this is not an acceptable solution as i have to toggle smooth so often.

Thanks

#2

You need to hold Shift only to start smoothing, then press Alt to reverse the modifier setting.

#3

Thanks for the reply marcus_civis. I gave that a shot but it’s not working correctly. If i set the smooth modifier to -100 and hold shift and smooth, it smooths peaks and leaves the valleys alone. And, a modifier of +100 does the expected opposite. Now when i press and hold shift and then press and hold alt, the smoothing brush icon freezes in location. If i have a modifier of -100 and i hold shift, mouse click, release shift, and press and hold alt (After looking a second time, holding alt has no effect), the smooth acts as a 0 modifier rather than a +100 modifier, smoothing all peaks and valley’s equally.

In zbrush 3.5 I was able to hold shift + alt to inverse smooth and it would go from -100 to +100 brush modifier. Unfortunately I’m unable to get this to work in 4. Maybe i’m still doing it wrong for 4.0 but it worked well in 3.5.

thanks for any further feedback.

ps, i do have both 3.5 and 4.0 installed on my computer. Could this cause a problem like overwriting some dll’s and acting weird with each other?

#4

I’m not able to invert the smooth brush properly when using the shift+alt hotkeys. Works with 3.5, doesn’t work with 4.0.

In 4.0 the brush indicator turns blue and a little "minus" sign appears( as it should). When I click on the model, the brush indicator aligns parallel to my view and freezes in place. No brush action happens at that point -- no smooth or anything until I release the stroke. Currently (in Zbrush 4) when I'm forced to press ALT AFTER I'm already painting smooth, my sculpt is ruined. An improper smooth is drawn across the model before I'm able to augment the smooth by pressing ALT. This is NOT the behavior of any of the other brushes. With the other brushes I can press ALT to invert a stroke before drawing the stroke. In the case of the smooth brush, you have to be in the middle of a stroke before you are able to invert the stroke by pressing the ALT key. This problem only exists for the smooth brush and only in Zbrush 4. That means it's a bug. Fix it please.

This is a serious workflow problem for me. I have to go back to Zbrush 3.5 to do any in-depth sculpting .

#5

Are you guys doing it the way marcus_civis said to do it? “You need to hold Shift only to start smoothing, then press Alt to reverse the modifier setting.”

The Key to doing it correctly is that it has to happen without letting up off of your initial stroke. So hold down shift, then while dragging a stroke across your mesh hold down alt without ever letting up off holding shift. If you approach it like you could in zb 3.5, by pressing shift, the alt, then clicking on your mesh it wont work… you’ll get that freeze blue circle. I’m so glad this feature works, it’s a lil different than before but it works. Such an awesome feature!

#6

The problem is that you MUST draw a stoke of smooth before you are allowed to invert the stroke.

Let me put it to you this way. Suppose you had to draw a Standard brush stroke (to pull out ) on the model before you could invert the stroke(to push in) there’s a problem: you pulled the geometry out before you pushed it in. You would always be pulling when you start whether or not you wanted to push-in or pull-out. The Standard brush (and all other non-smoothing brushes) don’t work that way.

By default my Smooth brush is set to smooth out high frequency details. On invert, my brush smooths only large details. Pushing ALT after I’m already smoothing means my high detailed mesh is smoothed before the brush switches over to large detail smooth. This action will destroy pores or any other high freq details just before I try to smooth larger details.

It’s one of the most frequent modeling operations I perform and I would like it to function like all the other brushes.

Now, in Zbrush 4.0, the brushes aren’t consistent in how they do a fundamental operation ( inverting).

I don’t think my fix request is too much to ask. I don’t see why more people aren’t complaining about it.

Besides, why would the Pixologic software designers want a SHIFT + ALT hotkey that does nothing at all?

#7

I see…you raise a good point. Having to first sculpt on the mesh, then hold alt is bad. Hmmm hopefully they will fix it in the next version.

#8

In my experience you only have to click the pen/mouse button before pressing Alt, not actually drag a stroke.

#9

I use a pen and tablet, when I click down it’s not so easy to keep the pen completely immoble right before I press ALT. I always get that little bit of the wrong smooth stroked on my model.

Also, it is hampering to your workflow when you’re used to swiping strokes and just hitting ALT between swipes. Now you have to press SHIFT, CLICK LIGHTLY(and don’t move your pen a single millimeter),press ALT, FINISH DRAWING STROKE.

Before, the move was: press SHIFT ALT, DRAW STROKE.

In Zbrush, other combos of SHIFT ALT CTRL SPACE do all kinds of crazy cool things by pressing and releasing them at the right times. How come SHIFT ALT (before smooth stroke)doesn’t do anything at all but freeze the paint indicator on the screen and disallow drawing anything on the canvas? It’s a dead hotkey combo, but only for the smooth brushes. All other brushes use the hotkey perfectly.

Now, when I sculpt, I have to remember a special rule for the smooth brushes. I just want all the brushes to behave the same – like they used to.

Thanks,
Mike.

#10

I totally feel with ya mdfisher272. I miss the way it was in 3.5. Like you said, every other brush is SHIFT ALT, DRAW STROKE to get this zsub to work, so this just kinda breaks that methodology.

Reason why you’ll get the blue circle freeze thing is because it seems to be the hotkey to scub in the timeline (if you have 2 keys present). If your animating with the timeline its actually really really fun to use this hotkey, shift + alt scrub. But its a shame it changes the workflow of inverse sculpting of a brush if its tied with shift.
Personally I wish we had more sticky keys enabled for accessing brushes. Why is shift and the spacebar the only ones? But anyway hope that helps clear up why you get the blue circle thing … if you keys on the timeline you’ll see it scrub.

#11

Zbrush’s animation tools are the icing, not the cake. Timeline dragging should not replace heavily used modeling hotkeys.

Maya’s CLICK + DRAG timeline functions are some of the least used hotkeys in the app, and Maya is WAY more of an animation tool than Zbrush. In Maya, at least I can reassign the CLICK + DRAG timeline hotkey to any combination of hotkeys.

I don’t understand why Zbrush developers decided to change a fundamental modeling hotkey (and one that still exists for all other modeling brushes). A timeline click drag is probably 1/100 as common as inverting a smooth stroke(before you draw it).

The typical Zbrusher executes many modeling operations for any single change that he will examine by dragging the timeline(assuming the user needs the timeline at all).

ANOTHER HOTKEY CHANGE: Releasing SHIFT while doing CTRL + SHIFT + DRAG no longer inverts the selection rectangle(used to turn it from green to red) – only the green rectangle is drawn. Now we have to press ALT to get red retangle. I don’t know what functions now use the old combo but it appears to be nothing. BTW the new clipping brushes behave the same as the selection brushes.

Is there any way of assigning “invert brush”(before I draw a stoke) to a meta key combo, or make Zbrush 4 use the old default modeling hotkeys?

User Interface 101 is that you maintain consistency in your UI. As of now, Zbrush 4 has introduced a “quirk”. End users don’t like quirks. Quirks make the job just a little more unnecessarily difficult.

Why did they change hotkeys that have been a constant since Zbrush 2.0 (as far as I know)?

#12

I don’t get inverted smoothing no matter how I press the alt. Anyone figured this out or found a alternative?