How do I apply a uniform stroke along a curve?

[LeoAMD]

This is driving me up the wall. I cant seem to get it to work. I have the MAHcut B brush and I have turned on curve mode. I have my mesh organized into polygroups and I have used the “frame mesh” in the curve menu pallet. I now have my curves drawn exactly where I want them but I cant seem to get them to update when I click on them. the only way I can any result is if I click and drag on them but this is useless as it moves the curve and creates messy stokes.
I just want to be able to create a uniform stroke along the path of the curves.
Any help would be awesome

EDIT

Also is it possible to stroke multiple cuves at once?

[_4Z4R]

Maybe would help turning off “Bend” in Stroke Menu/Curve subpalette. I tested and i don´t have any problems when using frame curves with polygroups and holows.

Hope it helps, cheers

[LeoAMD]

Thanks for the suggestion. I have already got these options turned off but it doesn’t seem to help.
Another problem I’m having with this is that when I get a messy update of the curve it is shortening the length of the curve and therefor not brushing along the desired length of the mesh

[_4Z4R]

Sorry i thoungt it was an IMM brush. Now i tested with the MAHcut B, I found better to switch off intesity in curve modifiers to have better results. Also bend off and Snap on. Maybe if you can share a screen capture of what is you issue…

cheers!

[LeoAMD]

Cool. Still not having any luck even with those settings.
Here are some screen grabs.

First one showing the mesh with the curves in place

Second screen showing the messy result. (In order to get this I have to click and drag slightly as simply clicking to update the stoke gets no results)

Thirdly here is what happens to the end of the curve. You can see it has moved from its original point. This happens EVEN when I have lock end and start switched on

[LeoAMD]

I have gone slightly mad from trying to find a way around this problem and I have ended up painstakingly selecting each tiny little polygon along the edge of the polygroups, masking them and then using the inverted mask to do a negative inflate. Now I have the result I want but I feel that I have to solve this problem or I will be up all night thinking about it.:rolleyes:

[_4Z4R]

Yep, i have the same and some more issues. In fact if you make some polygroups and then subdivide it over 200k points then Frame Mesh don´t works properly. After testing what you said. I notices it changes the curve start and end points and as you screengrab above it becomes totally useless curve…

[LeoAMD]

Oh yeh I forgot to mention about the frame mesh issue. Yeh if I go above a certain polycount and use the frame mesh function I get really small curves.
Well I’m glad I’m not the only one. Guess this is a bug that pixologic will hopefully fix in the next release.
Thanks for your help on this one ][-][4Z4R][)). Very much appreciated.
PS Lovein the eyelash brush by the way

[_4Z4R]

Oh glad to know i helped a little and that you like the EyeLash brush
Well curves are pretty new features in Zbrush so it seems they need to improve some issues.:lol:

[MichaelMaehring]

any news on this topic? My frame mesh curve behaves exactly like in the screenshots posted above.

I am simply trying to apply an alpha brush along a curve to create a stitch line - any ideas how I could achieve this without having to use an insert mesh brush?

interesting topic, thanks for posting it here!

[Doug_Jones]

http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/3d-modeling/sculpting/sculpting-brushes/alphas/

[MichaelMaehring]

Thanks for sharing a link about alphas (?)

But we are talking about using brush + alpha + curve. Here is another example, some suspenders:

I have created polygroups, that I can frame curves on:

here are the resulting curves:

If I try to apply a brush stroke, like stitches, the curve gets messy and the stroke isn´t applied with any kind of control:

but this is, what I´d like to achieve (I did this manually):

So the question is: If I have proper curves and I want to create sitches (or repeat any alpha) along those curves, how would I do that (without having to use insert mesh brush)?

any help appreciated!

[MichaelMaehring]

So no one has an idea how to use curves and brushes together? LOL!

that´s what I find funny about Pixo; they supply more and more tools, that are groundbreaking, but the existing tools lack in development.

[marcus_civis]

One problem with Frame Mesh is that the curve is related to mesh density. I imagine that this is because it was created primarily for use with the topology brush. Unfortunately this means that you can’t vary the curve steps for a curve created using Frame Mesh. This rules out many uses for this type of curve, including getting an alpha to repeat along its length.

If you draw the curve by hand, for example using the Curve Standard brush, then you can easily repeat an alpha along the length. Change the Stroke type to DragDot to apply the alpha in a single click. However, with curves over curved surfaces this won’t necessarily give regular results. In some circuimstances the alpha appears to be stretched.

Using InsertMesh works fine with a Frame Mesh curve. If you want to avoid using inserted meshes then one possibility would be to duplicate the subtool, apply the InsertMesh brush to the curves on the duplicate, then project the result on to the original subtool.

[MichaelMaehring]

Thanks for the reply!

I would love to see the curve functionality extended to be used in the manner described above - in my opinion curves and brushes have to find common ground!

anyway, sometimes we have to do things manually

[Iskras]

U cant use curve with ALPHA in Zbrush because Pix-ILOGIC dont do nothing with any sense… like that STUPID Curve standard, we dont use to nothing, is unusefull…
Yes - Pix-ILOGIC need do we pay a ASS do to hard surfaces…