Dropping and picking up from canvas. IMPOSSIBLE?

[Aberrant]

There may be a yes or no answer to this question.

Can you pick up something your working on after its dropped to the canvas?

Lets say I load a z-sphere and draw it out.

I make some small details on it.

Turn off draw and rotate it a bit and then move it a bit. (I can still click edit and sculpt more if i want to)

Now I go to the Spiral 3D tool and I draw a couple on top of my sphere that I just created. I draw a couple on it and position how I like.

Here is the key part of my question - Lets say I want to go back to my sphere and add a bit more detail to it? I cannot click edit to do so. Also I cannot move scale or rotate anymore. It is permanently stuck now. What If I wanted to save this as a tool right now with the spirals drawn on top of it? I cannot do so?

[Aberrant]

I just wanted to get your attention Aurick, since I know you have the answer in that brain of yours. Is it impossible?

[Kerwin]

Once you drop a tool (such as mesh) to the canvas by leaving edit mode, it is converted to Pixols (height-cued pixels) and is no longer available as polygons. There are tricks with multi-markers and layers to let you manipulate the Pixols, but essentially the mesh-representation of the tool/object is now gone.

The best way to add meshes together and keep them editable is subtools.

To stay in 3D, do not leave Edit mode.

If you haven’t ended your ZBrush session, there should still be a copy of your mesh/tool on the tools pallet. Use “Save Tool” from the tools menu to save your sculpture. The “Save” command from the canvas only saves the Pixol-representaiton of what you have on the canvas, but does not save your tools/meshes/objects.

Part of the confusion for those new to ZB is that the “native” world of ZB is 2.5D, e.g. Pixols. Meshes & Objects are called “Tools” and most manipulators (whcih we might call tools) are “Brushes”. This need to save sculptures seperately from the canvas can be a stumbling point.

In ZB3, it should warn you if you’re about to leave edit mode with an unsaved tool.

-K

[Aberrant]

Thanks Kerwin! Appreciate the breakdown and info. I understand now that a “tool” can be edited and have objects and other tools as subtools, but once I draw another tool on the canvas the previous one gets converted to 2.5D. I totally see what you mean about the stumbling point. There are some nice advantages to working in 2.5D that would be awesome if it could stay 3D. What I mean is, if there was a way to pick up after dropping to 2.5D. Im sure its for performance reasons but I would love to see the ability to flip flop at any time in the process similar to the way projection master works.

Once again thank you for your help. I just need to stick to subtools and do all my scene setup in another app.

[Kerwin]

You can do illustrative scenes in ZB, too. You just need to plan them out more like a 2D illustrator and less like an animator. (I do most of my personal scene work in tools like Maya, C4D, and Modo.) Meats Meir has a really good DVD on ZBrush of Illustrators at the Gnomon Workshop. He gives a lot of good ideas on moving back and forth between ZB’s 3D sculpting and 2.5D illustration.

While I prefer a pure 3D pipeline and don’t use ZB’s 2.5D anywhere near its full advantange, you can look at the work of a number of ZB artists who can really leverage the paint-like image manipulation that ZB’s 2.5D tools afford. When I have used ZB’s 2.5D for finished work, I usually have built all my tools in advance and then place them into the canvas at the last. It’s actually a nice tool for snapshotting several images of a concept into a single sheet.

-K