ZBrushCentral

3.1 Great Job, Pixologic!

ZBrush Usage Questions
#201

I’m pretty new to ZBrush, so this might be a dumb question. I was watching a guy demo ZBrush 3.1 at Siggraph yesterday, and his layers pallet looked more like what you get in Photoshop. His layers were in rows with visibility switches (eyes) down the right column. I asked him how he got it looking like that and he said that it was a change they made in 3.1. I just upgraded from 3.0 to 3.1 and my layers pallet still looks pretty much the same as it did in 3.0.

Anyone know what I’m talking about, and how I can get my layers pallet to look like his did?

Thanks,
Dustin

#202

I love this smooth brush its the flatten i always wanted. i never liked the flatten brush it always looks like spread butter on the edges please pixologic if you are going to make a new update later on please find some way to perserve the function of this new smooth brush!

#203

Ok , i’m going to write it again i wrote in 10 or so posts ago.

The Smooth Brush can act any way you want.
Adjust the smooth curve in the Brush Menu.
Default it is set with sharp edges , change the curve to a form like a skate ramp and you will get the smooth brush from 3.0

#204

:lol: That’s how I spotted the activate symmetry button. I hit x, and when it turned 70’s orange along with the X button I realized what the deal was.

#205

Namek is right but forgot to mention one important thing. Its not just the shape. I dont know how the curve looked in 3.0 but in 3.1 you need to do something silly. If you click on a point of the curve you get a circle around it right? You -also- get to see its values (x and y). Normally the curve goes all the way to one. This is whats “wrong” (if you can call it that). If i bring the highest point of the curve (the one the most to the right; the endpoint if you will) down to something like .3 (yes really that low) and then create a smooth curve towards it. The smooth brush works fine. I wonder what that curve looked like in 3.0 cause this is a weird fix to me. I guess 1.0 defaults a much stronger smoothing action then then before.

I hope this is the final bit of missing info that will help people get their “old” smooth brush back. It works fine for me now! Tried it extensively on some sharp edges. I can make em as smooth and rounded as i want with all the control i need now! Im happy \o/

The only thing i dont know is how to save that curve so it becomes the default for the smooth brush? If anyone has any pointers on that that would be great! :smiley:

GrtZ 3dioot

PS
Undoz i noticed the same with the brushes. Just like in zbrush 3.0 A real shame. :frowning:

#206

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=49536

#207

there’s an option to save the curve but you’d have to load it time and again on restarting zbrush… would be nice to make it work as a default indeed!

#208

I agree with dozogovi. The smooth does its thing much better than the old smooth brush. But if it must change, at least let it get saved in the config or something so it can be customized.

#209

ah. thanks for that–never noticed this before. i guess i tend to keep my brushes in zAdd mode all the time.

regarding the interface…i’ve got to agree with ambient-whisper on this. while the most recent changes may or may not appeal to ones personal taste, the attempt to improve the look and feel of zbrush is most certainly a worthwhile endeavor. for those of us who spend most of our waking hours staring into the icy chambers that are zbrush, max, maya, photoshop, etc…, a beautiful looking interface is about as important as a comfortable chair, a tasty lunch, good music… these things make me happy. especially when i don’t feel like working–but i have to…

#210

It is possible to clone and save a version of the Smooth brush which will be loaded each session. Any curve adjustments will be saved with the brush. You can make this the Shift-Smooth by Shift-clicking on it but currently I don’t think the setting is saved with the configuration.

#211

I tried to overwrite the original smooth brush with a saved slightly altered version of it. So far its not giving me the expected result but i could very well be doing something not 100% right. What i DO wonder about though is the curve that is -specific- to smooth. If i select the smooth brush (so no shift) and then go in the brush rollout i can manipulate TWO curves. I have the “edit curve” and the “smoothing curve”. I am working on the smoothing brush. Now im confused. Is the “smoothing curve” only used when i use the smooth brush with shift? And is the edit curve disregarded? Or are they both active at the same time if im using the smooth brush (with shift or just by really picking it as my brush to work with). Im confused on what curve does what; especially if i want to save a new smooth brush. Please enlighten me. :smiley:

Grtz 3dioot

#212

i love minimalistic/no crap apps, but they do get sorta boring to use after a while. the overall working environment needs to change sometimes. atleast for me it does :D. but ive always been one of those people who cant work in one environment for more than 1/2 a year. it has to change somewhat.

btw. with hotkey assignments, you can essentially clear the whole “stage”, and key what you need. or even macro certain things like creating displacements/ applying textures as displacements, etc.

#213

Yea, being a complete noob to this program I was about to make a complet fool of myself trying to figure that one out. I was watching an instructional vid that was talking about ZB3.0’s interface and it occured to me to look up under the Transform menu and make sure and have the X and M switches on!!

Also found the color schemes, a nice olive 2 is my favorite so far with some tweaks to the text colors. I’m quite happy with the whole interface!! :slight_smile:

#214

Does anyone know why the framing button that is now “F”, doesn’t actually frame you entire object within the working window? It seems to only center the main body of your tool. Is there a way to make it frame the entire object?

#215

i tried reading though the new posts but with 150 odd entries i might have missed something.

i keep crashing every time i try to put a mask on the model and then recall my action line.

also i never really played with the layers but after the upgrade i noticed that, with a character model i have with sub tools, it won’t let me select “subtool 0” which is the body, and create a layer. it’s greyed out. it will only let me create layers for the other subtools. i was hoping to try the layer approach to the “pose and then go back to symmetry sculpting” issue that had been addressed else where. though i guess that the upgrade is supposed to have the new “sym transpose” feature, i haven’t found it yet.

#216

lol, the advice is upgrading to vista? ok give me 100€ and i´ll do.

#217

I’m a little confused about what’s new in 3.1.

I see the list:
New Brush Palette, new Brush Features:
Color Mask and Back-Face Masking,
ZMapper
Displacement Exporter
Reproject Higher Subdivision Levels,
Poseable Symmetry,
User-Assigned Hotkeys,
Support for square alphas,
Refined User Interface.

But really a video demonstrating the new feature changes would be extremely nice.

#218

can confirm, that it is more stable with vista… better, it lasts now for HOURS without any kind of crash or noticable bug. (memory seems to be adressed better and faster… eg ctrl+z rebulds unbeliveable faster than xp machine)

zmapper works really fast here, will do a compare tomorrow with the xp machine same tool etc on winxp32 :grimacing:

btw… where the hell does the “skip welcome screen” button goes?
anyway, many many nice new functions again:
AAA+! pixo :+1: :+1: :+1:

still i get messed up gettin my bumps in realtime,… that sux really!:angry:

g-night
k0s

#219

There was a post a while ago about Zmapper giving weird results when attempting normal maps with say a head and hands visible and the body hidden. I was hoping to skip the whole displacement-Xnormal route, and was overjoyed when Zmapper was included in 3.1.

Unfortunately, when I tried to create a normal map it basically exploded when I did a “high res preview” and the normal map was anything but normal! Any ideas if this is a bug solely related to models with uv groups? Any help will be appreciated.

#220

yeah high res preview is sometimes strange… err everytime strange, until you calculated a normal then a projected normal, thought it was my fault or corrupted mesh :\

k0s

btw … did anyone tried to subd a simple sphere ? it breaks up at the top and bottom points… you ll start to see that at level 4 +