Hi @CountQuadula ,
It sounds like you have a bit of a mess here. 
It’s possible you may be experiencing overlapping issues. Let me throw out a few pointers and see if anything is helpful.
- Extreme offset/oversize mesh. Meshes that are extremely large or drastically offset from world center in the ZBrush worldspace may experience issues in the program. If imported properly, ZBrush corrects for this to both auto size ( to an XYZ of 2) and center the mesh. It records the values to restore the mesh on export to the original size/position in Tool> Export.
- ZDepth on the Canvas. This is generally determined by the depth you first draw out the tool on the canvas. If you first draw the tool out by making contact with any portion of the canvas that has a Pixol (2.5D ) elevation, that will change the depth of the drawn model. An example of this would be starting your stroke on the image of another mesh that had been snap-shotted to the canvas. If you have weird issues with a mesh clipping through the ZBrush background, try exiting Edit mode, use Ctrl-N to clear the canvas even if you don’t see anything, and then redraw the tool.
However, if you’ve merged together various subtools that each have extreme offsets or may be oversized, it is possible for clipping issues to occur because of the new mesh’s problem dimensions in the worldspace.
- Mesh not responsive to sculpting. Can rotate, but acts as if it’s been masked. This can happen if you draw a tool out on the canvas with a ZIntensity of less than 100. Exit edit mode, clear the canvas as above, and redraw the tool on the canvas with max Zintensity.
-
Using the main screen results in twisting and distortions , because some invisible force is masking or clearly effecting the mesh.
I’m not sure what you’re describing here, but it’s possible you may be using the Gizmo with a Focal Shift value of greater than -100 for the active Transpose brush. The Gizmo manipulator is capable of soft deformations now. The falloff is controlled by the Focal Shift value. At a value of -100 (the default) , this affects all point son the mesh equally. Values greater than this will only partially affect the mesh.
- Off-Center Pivot. Using Deformation> Unify on the mesh should correct this. If it does not and the mesh still appears to be off center after being unified, I would guess that you actually have some geometry someplace on the other side of the mesh that is throwing off the center. Perhaps some stray points that are difficult to see with the naked eye.
In this case you could go subtool to subtool, and draw a selection marquee around the entire portion of the invisible mesh. If you’re familiar with the visibility shortcuts, you know that this hides any geometry that does not fall under the selection box. You can then use Tool> Geometry> Modify Tology> Delete Hidden to delete any hidden geo.
If nothing is hidden by the operation then ZBrush will tell you it can’t perform the deletion because it requires hidden geometry. If however the process appears to complete then something was deleted.
Finally, let’s review the import process to make sure the procedure is not introducing some problems for you.
-
Restart ZBrush. Select the default polymesh3d star primitive from the Tool menu to serve as an import target. This assures you of having a clean slate in the Tool> Export menu. If you import with any other mesh active it may have non-zero values unique to that tool active in that menu, and the incoming mesh will inherit these. This is the most common cause of scale/position shifts when working between programs.
-
If importing multiple meshes in separate files that are designed to fit together, you must first import a key mesh as I have described above , and then do one of the following:
- Import each subsequent mesh individually as above and append them to the key mesh. Do not import them while the first mesh is active.
- Use the multi-append feature.
The main thing here is you must first import one mesh individually to establish the scaling, then append the other meshes so they inherit that scaling. If you attempt to multi-append all the meshes at once with another tool active it will cause issues.
If you continue having problems and aren’t able to troubleshoot them on your own, please feel free to contact ZBrush Support to provide the file for examination.
Thank you!
It’s possible you may be experiencing overlapping issues. Let me throw out a few pointers and see if anything is helpful.