ZBrushCentral

Loading Alphas Efficiently

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Back in the days, we had an awesome way of loading alphas into out scene using either the Alpha & Texture Loaders or the Alpha Library Browser. Back then we’d simply double click an alpha and it would be loaded into the alpha slot.

Today, we have lightbox. If we double click an alpha, it’s loaded into spotlight, which is not what I want, as it’s far slower to work with. To load an alpha in the alpha slot today, we have to drop the tool, shift doubleclick the alpha, then re-ender edit mode. This is really not intuitive, and it’s one of those things you have to know. There is pretty much no way you would think about this otherwise.

Am I missing something here? Being able to load an alpha efficiently is really an important aspect when detailing.

Edit:

Aaand nevermind. I’m being an idiot here. I dont have to exit edit mode. I simply have to double click the alpha in the light box.

#2

If I want to use Lightbox to load alpha’s directly into the Alpha palette, I hold down Shift key and triple click on them, and also, they have to be Greyscale, 8 or 16 bit. If they’re not, they will get loaded into the Texture palette instead. I thought I would just add this in case anybody else is doing searches on this later.

#3

Okay, I’m having trouble here anyway.

  1. Use the Standard Brush with DragRect as stroke type.
  2. Go to the desired alpha in Ligthbox.
  3. Shift + Double Click on the Alpha. This loads it into the alpha palette, but in the SMOOTH brush. Why is that? Sure, I can just go to the standard brush and select the alpha, but this is not intuitive at all.

Tripple-clicking also has the same effect: It’s loaded into the smooth brush’s alpha palette.

My solution seems to still be: Exit Edit Mode, Shift Double Click the Alpha, Reenter Edit Mode. Sure, it works, but it’s not as fast as it should be.

#4

Yes, that only loads it into the Alpha palette. You still have to select the alpha for whatever brush you are using, and not only that, but now, if you don’t want the alpha on whatever brush you have assigned to the Shift key, you have to turn it off or change it. It was probably not a good idea to use the Shift key to load images from the Lightbox. I sometimes wondered why they did. What would be real nice is if you could just drag and drop it out of Lightbox onto the Alpha palette icon or onto the Texture icons for textures. That would speed it up considerably.

#5

Yes, it seems to be a rather silly implementation, especially considering it was good in 3.5 and previous versions. It used to take one step to get an alpha into a brush, now it’s 3. Just one of those annoying little things which breaks the smooth workflow. Also, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense having to exit edit mode, shift double-click, then enter edit mode. I don’t believe this is logical at all.

#6

I agree totally. Double click should simply load into alpha. Shift double click could be for Spotlight, then smooth brush thing would be non-issue.

-m

#7

Could your technique be created in ZScript? Just curious. I"ve not looked into ZScript yet to see how much can be done with it. But after its created assign it to a hotkey?

#8

No, it’s not possible to use zscript with Lightbox.

#9

Check out this vid on PointPushers YouTube page. I just installed it last night and it works just fine.

http://www.youtube.com/user/pOiNtPuShEr#p/u/22/txn5IR8LzPk