ZBrushCentral

Brushes not keeping settings

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’m getting some weird behaviour when changing the active brush. I have a bunch of custom brushes along with the standard ones, I’ve set some shortcuts for them, but it seems that sometimes, when I change the active brush (no matter if I do that by a shortcut or by a button), not all the brush parameters get changed (sometimes the alpha stays the same, the intensity and I guess other parameters do that too). Is that a normal behaviour? (brushes randomly not setting their own parameters?). I suppose not. Is there another “not to” involved I should have known about or is there something I do without realising? Thanks.

#2

And one more thing. What the “Brush changed with current settings intact” message mean?
I often get this message when changing brushes.

#3

I think what you’re getting is about right.
In 3.1 some brushes adhere to a “Global” settings while others adhere to own (local) settings. I think this is due to how the brushes do things. For example, the clay seems to displace pixols using different algorithm as say, the standard brush and thus uses different parameter (programming-wise).

Or, it could be one of those things that got broken in Z3 series. Though I doubt it for 3.1.

Let’s see how the Z3.1 mac goes.

#4

Hmm that’s weird, because sometimes it works perfect (the parameters change). But other times, things go wrong. I won’t be able to see how zbr for mac will handle that, since our pipeline is based on win xp.

#5

Boy, i have this problem too!! isn’t that nice

Select alpha on one brush, it copies it to another when i switch to it, then i get rid of it, sculpt, go back to original brush… alpha is gone.

nice

#6

The Reset Brush plugin is designed to help with this problem.

#7

the reset brush plugin does not solve this problem

(as mentioned in another thread related to this topic)

m

#8

I said it helped with the problem. The plugin will restore whatever brush settings you save using it, which includes alphas.

#9

right, marcus

there´s a difference between helping and solving

and the reset brush plugin definitely helps

I didn´t want to bother you, it´s just that I have lost so much time with ennoying zbrush bugs (and most of them aren´t even bugs, nobody can tell me, that there ain´t no way to switch between brushes without losing the settings - from a programmers view)

it´s just a bundle of attributes which need to be stored.

I just don´t get it why things like this are not beeing taken care of by Pixologic.

regards,

m

#10

I can assure you it is a known issue and is being dealt with.

#11

This issue can be quite a headache. Fortunately I’ve found a fairly simple workaround to deal with it using macros.

You may notice if you manually turn ZAdd on and off via the menu before switching your brush via hotkey you won't have this issue. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it appears to break whatever is causing Zbrush to think you want to transfer brush settings. So the idea here is to create a macro that turns ZAdd on and off and then selects the desired brush. You then assign a hotkey to this newly created macro and use it as your new brush. For example, lets say you wanted to create a macro to fix the Clay brush: 1. Start a new macro. 2. Turn ZAdd off and then back on via the menu button. 3. Navigate to the brush menu and choose the Clay brush. 4. End the macro and save it in your Zbrush3/ZStartup/Macros/Brushes folder under the name ClayFIX. 5. Navigate under the macro menu and find the button for the ClayFIX macro you just created. Assign a hotkey to it that you would have normally used for the Clay brush. 6. You should now be able to switch to the Clay brush without encountering the bug. Repeat these same steps for every other brush you use. It didn't take me much longer than 10-20 minutes to replace all my brushes with the fixed versions. Happy Zbrushin'.