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Instructor at Academy of art having ZBrush 3.5 r3 problems.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

ZBrush 3.5 problems:

I am currently a ZBrush instructor at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I am having some difficulty getting certain things to work in 3.5 r3. Any help would be great.

  1. How do I bring back the “Safe Area” border. It seems to have disappeared.

  2. When Re-Topologizing my mesh, is it possible to select my polygroups so i can hide other areas that get in the way? Seems to me i can only hide the mesh by shift dragging, but CANNOT just select polygroups. This doesnt seem to work once the mesh has been rigged and ready to be topologized.

  3. Any reason ZProject does not work. I cannot ZProject geometry, nor can I ZProject textures from image planes. For some reason my underlying subtools get darker, but thats it. I get as far as getting the texture onto the plane, and my mesh is then ready to go. But when i use the ‘move’ transpose line to capture the texture it does not work.

ANy help would be great!

Thanks

#2


  1. ZBrush doesn’t have a “safe area” in the animation program sense. What you’re referring to is lines that appear around the edge of the canvas which act as if they are outside of the canvas edges for purposes of moving/scaling/etc. They give you the effect of empty canvas even if they have polygons displayed in them. They only become visible if there is a model in edit mode and the canvas size is larger than the available space in the interface.
  2. Once you start retopology you cannot affect the source mesh in any way. That means you can’t hide parts of it.
  3. ZProject’s functionality is being changed for ZBrush 4. Some of the functionality from 3.1 has temporarily been removed because of changes in the code in preparation for 4. I believe that at the moment it can only project from what is directly behind it on the canvas.

#3

thanks for the help. Now ill feel better when i tell my students these problems. I do wish though that you could select your polygroups while in topology mode. I cant seem to topologize in areas that are hidden or compact covered with geometry (like inside of the mouth).

#4

For item (2) you can hide/show polygroups if you use Joseph Drust’s method of retopology by appending a zsphere.
See here:
Joseph Drust: Retopology with Appended ZSphere
Simply switch between the subtools to show/hide the parts you want.

#5

Yeh, what I have done in the past is load the tool I am unapologizing, hide what I want, then go back to my ZSphere (retop one), and select the mesh agian, and it will be the version with bits hidden, you can go back and forth as often as you want doing this.

Unless you mean hiding parts of the new topology.

#6

aurick i believe you can hide the base mesh using the normal hiding methods and lasso too, i do it all the time.

#7

yeah i was refering to hiding individual poly groups within a subtool. I have a dragon head i want to retopologize and its horns are in the way of its ears. Plus i cant even get to the inside of the mouth or eye sockets without being able to use my polygroups.

thanks!!!