ZBrushCentral

Zbrush duplicates without my approval - what is going on

ZBrush Usage Questions
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#1

I am once again, extremely lost with what on Earth Zbrush is doing.

I was sculpting for practice as a textbook I bought has instructed me to, and all of a sudden, the tool I was working on duplicated without me telling it to duplicate it.

What was I doing? Just using the gumball (Gizmo, is it? In Zbrush jargon) to place the insert-sphere brush generated sphere into the tool and switched to the move brush using shortcut B+M+V

Then, when I tried to pan the tool with alt+right click, the tool I was working with no longer responded to my command - instead, out of thin air, the tool birthed another identical tool and now I was somehow in control of this second copy. Pan, Move zoom in or out, whatever - the sudden duplicate was what I was editing and the original tool was now completely stuck and as you can see in the screenshot, completely in the way.
(It’s the bigger one shown in my workspace)

Well, I don’t mind Zbrush making silly errors but I can’t erase or delete this now immobile original tool (subtool shows only one tool available. It’s not like there are two identical tools) so it hinders my visibility, just completely in the way and extremely annoying.

I opened a new file and deployed the model as a tool to just start again where I left off before Zbrush made this irritating error, but whaddayaknow - it did it AGAIN.

So, I’m suspecting somewhere along the move brush BMV or alt+right click command is prone to causing some sort of obscure command that makes Zbrush do this weird thing. (God I hate the concept of edit mode - why can’t it just let us edit whatever tool’s in the works? Once something’s immobile, it’s done and over. I really wonder who thought that was a brilliant idea.)

Any way…what in Heaven’s name is going on here? Why does Zbrush keep wanting to duplicate the tool and kick the original out of edit mode, but keep it visible? Any help would be appreciated since this just logically doesn’t make sense to me.

DAFAQ

#2

Hello @JTG ,

I can’t tell you exactly what is happening from this information. You would need to contact Support so we can get a better look at what’s happening in real time.

However it sounds like something is snapshotting your model to the canvas, as would happen with the Shift+ S shortcut. This drops a copy of the model to the canvas as 2.5D information or Pixols. Please review the “Basic concepts” section of the ZBrush documentation for important information about ZBrush that may continue to confuse users unless they are familiar with it.

If this is what’s happening, it is simple to clear the canvas with the Ctrl-N shortcut.

I can’t tell you why this is occurring. You could be invoking the shortcut unintentionally or with some sort of custom hotkey conflict. Something running on your system could be changing the function of your keys. You could be experiencing a bug with some sort of repeatable sequence of events. You could be experiencing a conflict with some other running software. Your installation could be faulty. In all cases you would need to contact Support.

Thank you!