ZBrushCentral

Question about Masking brushes [Answered]

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Is there a way to convert a normal brush into a masking brush, sometimes certain brushes have many settings, lazymouse, alphas, stroke settings etc, having to copy all those settings to a masking brush is somewhat troublesome.
I guess i’m asking if there is a button somewhere that turns on masking within the brush palette.
Sorry if this has been answered already, i’ve been out of the loop for over a year.

i suppose just using black paint with those brushes and masking by intensity would be a workaround now that i think about it.

#2

You can hold down Ctrl, and make any changes to a masking brush that it supports. If you have the mask pen selected, you can modify that like any other brush in regards to alpha, stroke, lazy, etc.

You can then clone that brush, and save it out for quick recall at another time. I dont see a mask brushes folder by default in lightbox, but you can certainly make one, and save your mask pen variants there.

#3

Thanks, I was aware of that though, my original point was that if I had a normal brush with many settings it would be easier to enable Masking on that brush temporarily then to try to copy all of its settings to a masking brush, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
It would just be more efficient to change a brush to a Masking mode then to have a multitude of masking brushes.

#4

It’s not possible to turn a brush from one mode to another. So you can’t turn a regular brush into a masking brush, smoothing brush or selection brush.

But as Spyndel pointed out, you only need to tweak the settings once.

#5

One thing you can do if there is a particular brush you want to use for masking is to use polypaint to mask. For example, the Pen brushes produce some nice effects:

  1. Draw the what you want masked with polypaint only (turn off ZAdd).
  2. Press Tool>Masking>Mask by Intensity.

If your model has UVs you can hide the polypaint and so see the mask, by assigning a white texture:

Select white in the color selector then press Tool>Texture>New Txtr.

(Don’t forget to turn off the texture when you want to do more polypainting.)

#6

ah okay, thanks!