005 Files; Recovery; and Menus Video Lecture | Zbrush: Create Realistic Modelling - Professional Skills

So we talked about they hotkey, which is,
the draw size, which is, if you hover over
this it says "s".
Another one, if you tap spacebar, well, here's
the thing.
If you tap "s", it's going to bring up the
draw size, and then you can change it, and
then you let go.
The spacebar menu is a push and hold, so you're
going to tap the spacebar, and then hold it.
And this will bring up a whole cool menu of
stuff you can use.
And so here's you're move, scale and rotate,
since we're over there.
And you can see as you roll over them, they're
actually rolling over on the right as well.
You can turn your polyframe on and off in
here.
You can go move, scale and rotate while you're
in here.
The stuff we've been talking about is your
draw size, so you can change your draw size
while you're in this menu as well as your
zintensity.
So it's just kind of a one-stop-shop for everything
that's up here.
So you're not constantly having to go all
over your interface here, you can just kind
of hit your space bar, and you can go grab
a different brush, grab a different primitive
if you want to.
Change your alphas, stroke styles which we're
going to get into later, draw size, zintensity,
all that good stuff.
So know that that menu is also available to
you.
I don't tend to use it that often, but, you
know now that I look at it, maybe I should
use it more, because there's a lot of good
stuff in here.
So now lets say we love this object, we want
to keep it, we want to keep sculpting on it,
we want to keep doing more cool stuff to it.
But, we have to go to a different class, we
gotta go to work, so I'm going to save this
for later.
One thing you can do, that, as you're working,
what I like to do is just hit quicksave, which
the hotkey for that is 9, because instead
of going to file save as, and saving iteratively,
I'll just use this quicksave folder.
So if I hit comma, and then go to my quicksaves,
every time I've hit quicksave they'll show
up in here.
So as I'm kind of working iteratively, and
I'm not going anywhere, I'll just hit quicksave.
However, if I want to save iteratively, just
for something to back up on a source depot,
or just kind of peace of mind if something
crashes or something gets corrupted, what
you can do is, you can do Tool > Save As.
Now we've talked a little bit about File Save
As, which is saving your ZProject, and for
now we're going to keep it simple, lets just
save our tool.
So the tool is going to be tool save as, it's
going to save a ZTL, and basically anything
we've painted on our tool, any sculpting we've
done on our tool, anything over here in the
tool menu like...anything, subtools we have,
layers we've made, polypainting we've done,
UV Maps, Texture Maps, those are all going
to be saved with the ZTL.
And it's only going to save what's selected.
Now I have this, lets call this our navigation
sphere, we're going to go ahead and save this.
So lets go ahead and go to tool, save as,
and lets just throw this right on the desktop
here.
And we'll call this our navigation_sphere.
Now, again, the save as type is ZTL, it's
just going to be the default, and I'm going
to go ahead and hit save, and now we've saved
our ZTL.
If by chance you've accidentally gone out
of edit mode, you've fat fingered the "t"
key, and you're dragging stuff out, I think
we've talked about this before, all you've
got to do is hit CTL + n.
You haven't lost anything, all you have to
do is go back here to your tool menu, if you
click on it you've got your primitives, and
here's our navigation sphere, we've saved
it, drag it out again, go into edit mode,
you can go ahead and keep working.
Or, if you've gone home or you've gone to
work, and you've turned off ZBrush and you
want to launch ZBrush up and load up your
tools, go ahead and initialize ZBrush.
So we got home from work and now we want to
play a little bit more in ZBrush.
We gotta go grab that tool again.
So I'm going to go over here to load tool,
and you're just going to navigate to where
you've put it, which in my case is just on
my desktop here.
And I've got it sorted by date modified so
I'm going to go here to my navigation sphere
and I'm just going to double click that, and
I've got my navigation sphere loaded up.
Now of course if I click and drag on my document
it's going to be dragging out copies, if I
hit ctl +n, drag one out, hit "t" or go into
edit mode, and now I'm right back where I
started with this fabulous ZTool that I've
saved.
Now I wouldn't necessarily suggest doing this,
but if the last time you hit quicksave, you
know if I go over here and hit quicksave,
it's going to save a quicksave copy here,
if you want to , you can actually shut down
ZBrush, launch it back up, open up your Lightbox,
and the last quicksave will be in here because
it's just going to save iterative quicksaves.
And again if you go into preferences quicksave,
you're going to see the quicksave files, you
can crank this up to as high as it goes, I
keep it at ten, but you can go ahead and just
double click this, and that'll launch the
whole ZProject, which basically saves a whole
snapshot of your entire working space here,
with the tool loaded ready to go.
So either way is fine, just to play it safe
I like to save a tool out just to kind of
have things nice and organized.
One thing I haven't mentioned actually is
if I go out of edit mode, Ctl + n to clear
my canvas, I've got my simple brush here,
you're going to see by default, usually there's
a drag rect stroke applied after you've been
playing with ZTools.
That's basically a different stroke, we're
going to get to that, I'm going to hit ctl
+ n.
Where that comes in to play, is if you grab
your navigation sphere, and you click and
drag, it's actually doing a drag rect stroke,
if you change this stroke it'll actually do,
you know, this.
This is dots stroke, there's lots of cool
stuff in here we're not going to get to them
yet.
But, by default drag rect is when you drag
rect out a new poly, something to play with,
your tool, drag rect out, edit mode, and start
editing.
So just thought I'd bring that up just in
case you noticed that.
And one more recovery file I want to talk
about, because it happens occasionally isn't
your quicksave, but it's actually a zbrush
recovery file.
So if you're ever playing with your ZTool
over here, and all of a sudden ZBrush freezes,
and then it kind of does some thinking, and
then it shuts down, sometimes what'll happen
is when you restart zbrush, it'll say hey,
go to the last quicksave file.
So this will be like you've only lost the
last twenty minutes of work maximum.
Occasionally however, it'll actually save
that ZTL that it crashed on.
And where that is, and it's different than
a quicksave, a quicksave is actually a ZProject,
see how it's quicksave number 41854.ZPR, that's
a ZProject, it takes a snapshot of you entire,
your document, the position of the ZTool on
the document, all your tools that you have
loaded.
So that's cool.
However, if you go over here to the ZBrush
tab, and you go to recovered files, this will
be the last object that crashed on you.
Now, sometimes you know, you'll be working
and it'll just blink out of existence...probably
it didn't save out your tool, sorry about
that, you lost up to twenty minutes of work,
or how ever the max duration is on your quicksave
files.
Occasionally it'll sit there and think, and
it'll go hey, sorry ZBrush crashed, and then
when you launch up ZBrush it'll say hey, go
use your last quicksave.
Occasionally, go to this ZBrush tab, recovered
files, and just go to this recovered tool
and double click that.
That's going to load up the last crashed tool
that I have, and actually I don't want to
show you that, because that's not something
we need to be looking at.
So I'm going to go out of edit mode and ctl
+n.
So that is our last recovered tool, sometimes
it'll save it, sometimes it won't, and now
that we're talking about it, see if you double
click this little up arrow, that'll go into
these Zbrush folders, just really quick lets
go into the brush area, I'm going to click
this little four dotted thing over here that
makes it all available to us if we go into
here, we can go into like the deco brushes,
these are decoration brushes, you can go and
look at those, you can double click this up
arrow, so thats how you kind of navigate through
here.
We've talked a little bit about moving, left
and right, but we haven't really talked about
double clicking in here, going and grabbing
one of these, and then double clicking up.
And one more basic thing before we head out
and start getting into the meat of ZBrush,
is preferences, and dragging docking menus.
By default I believe you'll probably have
material over here; honestly, I don't material
all that much I actually use my brush options
a lot more just to have it docked over to
the side.
And this is real estate--so I want to make
sure everything that's up on ZBrush makes
sense to be there.
For a lot of time, I don't really use materials
all that much, I mean I do, I'll switch them
out, but I don't need a whole docking side
dedicated to my material settings.
So you know what I'm going to do, I'm going
to modify ZBrushe's interface, just a little
bit, save a configuration file so that every
time I load up ZBrush, what I want to have
up on my screen is...what I want to have up
on my screen!
So what i'm going to do is go to this material
menu up here, and you're going to see this
little...it's a circle with an arrow in it.
If you tap that, it'll actually get rid of
that menu.
Now it doesn't delete the menu, it's still
over here, so if you go over here to your,
and these are in alphabetical order, so in
the "m" area, you've got your material here.
If you click that dot, and you can kind of
drag it around, you can go and dock it over
here in the docking station.
You can minimize this divider by clicking
on those little double arrows.
And then once you have this little divider
area open, it's basically a little docking
palette area, and you can click and drag any
of these.
You can click and drag this one, and pick
and drag this one, you can drag as many as
you want to over here.
If you want to get rid of one, again just
tap that circle and that'll get rid of it.
So like I said, what I like to do over here
is put my brush settings.
So I'm going to go ahead and tap that circle,
and then I'm going to go here to my brush,
grab that circle, launch it over here.
If I want my brush to always be loaded over
here, and my tools to always be loaded over
here, all I need to do is go to preferences,
config, hit store config, and the hotkey for
that is ctl + shift + i, it'll say ok, it's
been saved successfully, and be restored every
time you start ZBrush.
Every time I start ZBrush, my brush menu will
be docked over here, my tool menu will be
docked over here, and I'm ready to go.
Before we leave, lets talk a little bit about
menu navigation.
So we've talked a little bit about tools,
and I'm going to actually hit preferences
initialize so we can get rid of that tool
we shouldn't be looking at right now.
And lets go ahead and load up our navigation
sphere.
Double click.
Drag that out go into edit mode.
So with our brush here and our tools here,
when we start really getting deep into these
tools, we're going to start making custom
menus so we don't have to do this, but lets
say you want to look at your subtools.
So if I click subtool, it's going to open
the subtool menu.
And there's a lot of stuff in here.
So if I click split, it's going to open up
split, options, merge options...Now, if I'm
just clicking once, it's going to open that
menu, and close the other one.
If I want to keep a menu open I hold down
shift, and that'll keep them open as I'm navigating.
So they're both useful, but usually I like
to have the menus I want open when I say open,
and if I want to close them I'll just go back
and manually close them by tapping them again.
So hold down shift to keep them open, as you're
opening multiple menus.
Same thing for down here, so I open up masking,
it's going to open my masking options, but
then if I open up deformation, it's going
to open up deformation, close my masking options.
So if I want them both to stay open, hold
down shift, that'll keep my masking and deformation
menus open.
And as I start opening these menus, lets open
a few more, subtool, I'm holding down shift,
and what's another useful one.
Polygroups is useful.
You're going to see this thing starts getting
really really long and cumbersome.
And even within these you're going to be in
here and there's going to be a lot of stuff
and options for you to start messing with.
So this is how you navigate, you click a menu,
you click a sub menu, so we've got here's
our big top menu, so I can go ahead and close
all that down; if I click that open, its going
to open my big menu, I can click and drag
to navigate, these are my submenus, so I can
go ahead and close these down just by tapping
them, I can tap them open, and that'll open
that submenu and close the rest, or if I hold
down shift, that'll open that menu and keep
the other one open.
And we're still navigating.
Within this subtool submenu we have another
submenu, which we have split, merge remesh,
and extract; if I hold down shift that'll
open these up and keep them open.
If I don't hold down shift and just click
them they'll kind of open and close depending
on what I have clicked.
So we've got tool menu, we've got a subtool
submenu, and within the subtool submenu we've
got more submenus, with more options in them.
And you can I guess, I assume you can nest
those as far as you want.
And we'll make our own custom menus that do
this as well.
So we've done that, and we've saved a config,
so that every time we start up ZBrush we'll
have our tools and our brush docked, same
thing over on this side, if I open these up,
we've got a lot of options in here, you can
drag, and even if you're up here, like say
the draw menu, if you click and you drag,
and you move around, so all of zbrush is pretty
consisent as far as how you navigate your
menus.
So, now that we've talked about the basics
of ZBrush interface, basic sculpting, basic
options, I think we've kind of set up ZBrush
so we can actually start doing the fun stuff.
So lets hop right into that.