ZBrushCentral

Illustration: mirroring? marquee?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

So, I’m getting started with a good sized illustration project, and am running into a couple issues:

  1. In illustration, is there a way to just mirror a section? I’m doing a project where I have a whole bunch of objects on a sheet, (picture a bunch of vehicles in top-down view) and I want them to be perfectly symmetrical. I see where you can flip the whole canvas, but I only want to flip a section.

I’m creating the vehicles by sticking together multiple tools, so I can’t make them all symmetrical in edit mode; I need to do it on the canvas, in pixols.

  1. In pixol illustration, is there a way to just cleanly grab a section of pixols, and move them? Like the marquee tool in photoshop: you just select a rectangular area, and move it? I can’t seem to figure out how to do that…

I’ve been using the cloner, and then lifting the stroke. (hitting W for move immedately after using the cloner.)… but it’s not very precise.
‘Stencil’ seem promising… but I can’t find any good descriptions of how it works.

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks!

#2
  1. I usually do this (mirroring Pixols) by duplicating the layer in question, then flipping that layer, erasing any unwanted pixols, then merging the layer down.

2)No, there is no Pixol marquee or transformation controls. That would be a great feature, but unfortunately the 2.5 features in the program have taken a backseat to the polygonal sculpting aspect of the program in recent development. I have long wanted this.

About the best you can do is duplicate the layer, and erase away all but the section you want. You can drag a layer’s contents around the canvas by pressing “`” (tilde), and dragging on the visible pixols of the active layer (avoid tiling when dragging beyond the edges by turning off “wrap” mode in the layers palette.

Save Often when performing operations like this, as layer merges cannot be undone, and the process is affected by settings like MRGB being on or off, and it is easy to make a mistake.

#3

another way would be to put the picture as a texture on a polyplane, then clone that and append as a subtool, i you do a slight rotation along the y axis they should intersect right at the middle, you could then drop to the canvas if you like.
also you could always use zproject to go from one tool to the other.

if you want to move parts of the canvas around once again its easier if its all on a polyplane