I’m new to Zbrush and I was wondering how you use other brushes such as the snake hook or smudge in 3D mode without getting stuck in 2.5D. I’d get a good sculpt going and then when I try to switch tools I get stuck in 2.5D and it irritates me cuz I’m using a 30 day trial.
When you’re sculpting an object you need to use the brushes from the Brush palette. If you select a different Tool, that snapshots the current tool into 2.5D and you can’t get out of it again.
Everything in the Tool palette is for adding pixols to the canvas. Everything in the Brush palette is for sculpting the currently editable tool.
There is a way that you can use other things from the Tool palette on the current model without remaining in 2.5D, and that is to use Projection Master. With that you can drop your model to the canvas, paint on it, then pick it back up and have what you painted projected onto the model. This includes polypaint and sculpting.