I apologize if this isn’t the correct section of the forum…
Mainly have used ZBrush to sculpt from basic shapes before, so I decided to give ZSpheres a try. I’m at wits end trying to figure out why my Adaptive Skin previews are ‘collapsing’ as shown below: 
turn classic skinning off. Then the greyed-out adjusters will be active.
Okay, I turned Classic Skinning off, but the ztool seems to be stuck in that mode (it skins as shown above no matter what settings I try). I can start new ZSphere models and they skin fine both in Normal and Classic modes (obviously with differing results, but all seems to be working as I would expect it to). I’ve tried reinitializing ZBrush multiple times, restarted the program and the computer. I’m at a loss as what to try next (was kind of hoping that someone else had experienced this and I had just bumped a setting in there somewhere 
).
It’s hard to tell what you mean, but I think you might want to just make a higher resolution skin when you do the Adaptive Skinning (or try dividing a couple times and sculpting some more), it seems really low poly.
change the size of the spheres or add more spheres.
even thou it’s not the results u want it is doing what your telling it to do
practice practice practice
I obviously don’t understand zspheres at all. What do you mean by ‘resolution’? I suppose my thinking is that the polys would scale like vectors. Is there a way to rescale/resample the whole ztool? Am I supposed to make the initial zsphere larger?
My ‘Intersection Resolution (ires)’ is set to 6, my ‘xres’ ‘yres’ ‘zres’ is set to 1 (using settings from one of cannedmushrooms’ zsphere tuts). I’ve tried higher adaptive skin densities, but the only difference is the number of polys it produces, the skin remains pretty much the same shape as above. I’ve resized my document to no effect…
Sorry, I’m completely lost. Can anyone explain what resolution means in zbrush in idiot’s terms? :lol:
I may not have used the word correctly, not “resolution” as in the number of pixels in a photoshop doc, but the number of polys in your geometry.
And polygons do not scale like vectors, perhaps you are thinking about NURBS?
Take a look at those links above and do a few tutorials, it’s hard to know where to begin with your problems, I think you might just want to get a little more background on how the software works.
Thanks for the links and advice. 
Previously I’ve only done a few head and skull sculpts from cube and sphere primitives in ZBrush (just the first few tutorials from the Scott Spencer Character book and much of the first Eat3D DVD). This is basically my first crack at doing anything with the program beyond the sculpting brushes.
Watching the tutorials, it seems that there are two main methods of approaching the ZSpheres… one where you block in the basic form and sculpt on the adaptive skin made from that foundation (what I was attempting to do above) and the other is to use the ZSpheres as an armature and then ZSketch on top of it?
Assuming that the second method will give me a more easily reposable result, I’ve remade my ztool with an almost skeletal structure and plan on ZSketching musculature over top of it.
Of course, as seen below, now that the zspheres will merely be used as an armature my adaptive skin preview is working as expected (I honestly have no idea what I did differently this time). :lol:
