Sometimes While I try and place a Mask on a tool
its like the mask tool runs out of paint, and stops masking.
I just zoomed in a small ammount, on the “demo soldier” tool,
and started masking, about an inch after I start, the mask stops applying, as i move the mouse.
Surely its not because I devided him up to 500k polycount.
hold shift, hold left mouse button, paint mask, dont release the button untill you wish to stop masking.
Anyone know why the mask stops applying?
Also,
Sometimes, once I have like 1mill polycount, the smooth geometry tool really seems to drop to like .00001 power, even when i crank up the intensity, and change up the draw size.
Is there a way to fix that?
Or what is it that causes it for the most part? hopefully there isnt a rule that says “sorry, its just useless after so many polygons” : (
hm, not sure if this is the right place, also I don’t think I could answer the first post’s question; what I do to get around with is to change the brush im using to mask with
as for the smooth going down in potency at higher levels, theres are so many polygons within a small space that it does that, if you have a face and you want to smooth very small areas then on high polygon subdivision and it will work fine; but if you want to smooth larger areas then go back down a few subdivisons and you will find the smooth brush works on that larger area better now that the polies are less dense
the subdivision level you are working on should reflect the size of the detailing you are working on
It’s not just masking. It’s also painting and sculpting.
ZBrush records all brush strokes. That’s what gives you features like the “Replay Last” feature from the Stroke palette, or the ability to record and replay ZScripts or even macros. Or the Undo feature, for that matter!
Each brush stroke is made up of a series of points. There is a limit to how many points may be recorded in a single stroke. (It has to do with computer math and bit depth, which makes most of us nonprogrammers’ eyes glaze over.) When that limit is reached, the brush stops working.
The only solution is to increase the bit depth of the stroke length. But due to computer math it has to be done exponentially, which means massively more memory use and so forth. It’s not as simple as you might think. 
Aurick, thank you for explaining it in tech terms it helps me at least, and now i won’t be so upset when it happens. one thing i hope though is that in z4 the stroke replay last function will be fixed and work as it did in z2, because now if you use that function to repeat the last stroke a few times it gets incrementally smaller.
TyVm.
: ) now I know.