ZBrushCentral

Brain Injury and the smooth brush

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Last spring I was afflicted by a subarachnoid hemmorage, a
bleed into the skull between the skull and the membrane
surrounding the brain. The effects are similar to those of a
stroke, needless to say I was hospitalized several weeks and
it has taken me a while to work up my endurance, which is
still rather limited. I was very fortunate to suffer fairly small
problems compared to most who are so afflicted.

I do find though I am having quite a bit of difficulty with one seemingly minor thing, that is not quite so minor in Z 3.5R2. The non-functional smooth brush. I have two setups, a small portable eee box that I use with

a cintique, and a tower system with 27" monitor with a 6x11
intuos 3. Unfortunately both systems are not easy to
keyboard and tablet at the same time, and it is now significantly
more difficult. Previously that was really only a real pain
while trying to make selections. But now the smooth brush
will not activate! (Yes, due to being sidelined I am just
now figuring that out!)

This is made worse by my current physical inability to hold
up the weight of the tablets, being forced to use an easel
to hold the intuos for example.

This is particularly bad as I like to
work by sculpting for a while, then flipping to the smooth
brush and using it while occasionally while rotating and
looking the model over. Trying to hold a shift key on a
keyboard 3-4 ft away from the tablet for several minutes
while trying to work accurately is just not happening.

I would use the button on the wacom pen, but the bindings
are already used up by other functions that require key functions.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Oh please Pixologic, you have always done such a wonderful
job with this package and I love the improvements, I can’t
wait to d/l and try out R3, but please, oh please, won’t you
restore my beloved smoothing brush? Even if all the button
does is enter and exit the smooth mode.

Thank you for your consideration,

Tom

#2

Hi

First of all I am sorry to hear about your brain injury. I hope the side effects are not detrimental to your enjoyment of ZBrush.

As for the smooth brushes in 3.5 I can sort of understand why they fixed it to the secondary brush key (Shift) as it results in a good workflow that many people would otherwise not take advantage of. However with your situation it is quite unfortunate it is fixed and not optional.

I was going to suggest mapping shift to the side buttons of the wacom pen as that makes most sense to me. But as they are taken have you tried using the Wacom Tablet Properties window to assign a SHIFT & Click modifier to the eraser part of the pen? Not sure if it works in ZBrush as the eraser on my pen is busted.

Apart from that I can only suggest mapping SHIFT to one of the buttons on the tablet itself or perhaps acquiring a gamer keypad like the Nostromo by Belkin, which has software for mapping the keys across multiple programs.

You are probably already aware of this but you can add additional programs to the Wacom Tablet Properties. Thought it best to add that in case your pen side buttons / tablet buttons were mapped for multiple programs at once.

Best of luck

#3

sorry to hear about your condition, hope you recover.

i would suggest opening a support ticket, it might be the only way pixologic even hears about your issue.

i agree about something like the belkin gaming pad, i had one it worked well but i didnt like the feel of it, but i had a older one.

a workflow thing you can try is to take your model, store a morph target, use deformation:smooth to get it quite smooth, then switch morph target(your model should be back to normal), create a layer, and then in areas where you want to smooth with the brush use the morph brush instead. the layer isn’t really necessary but i always like to have them as a backup.