conform curve to surface?

rodney71 · February 17, 2013, 5:59pm

Hi all,
slowly trying to find my way around Zbrush after years of fascination and standing on the sideline. It’s exciting to finally start jumping in.

One small question about curve brushes. it seems that the default behavior when drawing out a curve is for the curve to adhere to an underlying target surface pretty well, but when you take an end point and begin to drag the entire curve around your window the curve begins to lift off the background surface and no longer conforms to the surface it was projected on. Is there a function to force the curve to stay “stuck” to the background geometry as you drag it about?

If not, is there a way to “project” a curve back onto the background geometry (or any visible geometry behind it)?

this is pretty essential for managing these curves for me and seems I must be missing something.

any help is appreciated…
Rod.

rodney71 · February 19, 2013, 8:48am

Is my question unclear perhaps?

zber2 · February 19, 2013, 9:17am

I think your only options are to turn your mesh to the proper view and drag the curve back onto the mesh. Or, you can just redraw the curve. You also have FrameMesh, see page 27 in your ZBrush4_R5_whats_new.pdf and page 42 in your ZBrush4_R4_whats_new.pdf in your Documentation folder.

rodney71 · February 19, 2013, 1:47pm

thanks for responding ZBER2. that’s unfortunate that the constraint functionality is not interactive. It seems all the coding to make this possible is there but just not implemented. A great feature update this would be, I think. otherwise, I have to get the curve right the first time. yikes!

Doug_Jones · February 19, 2013, 3:48pm

Get the Axis plugin. It will help. Customizing the UI helps a lot. I might post another config later but I’m having a few problems with it ATM.

rodney71 · February 20, 2013, 8:47am

thanks for piping in Doug. that plugin does look useful. I don’t see how it relates to the curves leaving the surface when you start to drag them around the viewport though. even with changing the views it is near impossible to get a long curve to fully conform to a surface without a bunch of tweaking along the length of the curve…which doesn’t make for a smooth, natural looking curve.

Still, it’s a useful looking plugin so thanks for mentioning it.
Rod.