Greetings,
When sculpting polymeshes in ZBrush 3.5_2 I noticed that the smooth peaks and smooth valleys brushes aren’t working. Has anyone had this problem?
Actually, they are working. Just different from how Smooth was handled in 3.1.
The way it works now is that the Smooth brushes can’t be selected as the primary brush. They are only available by holding Shift. So what happens is when you select one in the Brush palette this simply tells ZBrush to use that one any time you hold Shift.
There are some big advantages to this. With 3.1 it was something that really slowed you down to have to select the Smooth brush to edit its settings then switch back to your regular brush. And if you needed to change the Smooth settings again you had to select the Smooth brush again, change the settings, then switch back to the regular brush again.
Now, to change the settings you simply hold Shift. While that key is held any settings changes will affect the currently-selected Smooth brush rather than the primary sculpting brush. This lets you make brush adjustments on the fly, speeding up your workflow.
The only catch is that you have to remember which Smooth brush you last selected. But even there you can make life easy by assigning hotkeys (such as 1, 2, 3) to the Smooth brushes. Or you can put them on one of the shelves in your interface so that you can easily switch between them with a click.