NEWBIE LESSON ONE
The Interface
This is the first of several lessons meant specifically for new ZBrush users.
No matter how much – or how little – experience you may have with graphic arts, all of this goes right out the window when you first fire up ZBrush. The interface is completely unlike anything else that you’ve ever run on your computer, and it’s easy at first to become lost in it.
What are all these different things? What do they do? Why do they move around, appear or disappear, and where do they go?
In truth, the layout is far from arbitrary. Pixologic was faced with a rather tricky question: When you have a program that can do all of this – paint in 2D, model in 3D and then blend the two together – how do you manage to fit everything onto the screen while still having enough room to actually be able to see your canvas? It can’t have been an easy challenge, and the evolution of the interface since I first started using ZBrush with version 1.13 shows that they are still looking for that “perfect” answer – if it even exists. Suffice it to say that a whole lot of power has been packed into a relatively small area!
This series of tutorials will cover such subjects as basic modeling, painting, materials, lighting and rendering in a way that will hopefully be easy for the new user to understand. But I think that a very good place to start is by helping you to become more comfortable with the interface itself.
Before we begin, I would recommend that you take a quick look at your monitor settings. The more space that you have available on your desk top, the easier it will be to work with ZBrush’s menus. The minimum setting that Pixologic recommends is a monitor resolution of 1024x768 set to 32-Bit True Color. I personally work at 1152x864 – and even then I occasionally run out of room. 
If you don’t know how to change your setting, here are the instructions for a PC (I’m afraid that I don’t know the Mac method).
[img]http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/zbc_uploads/user_image-1017220990ovr.jpg[/img]
<UL TYPE=SQUARE><LI>On your computer’s desktop, right click any place that doesn’t have a window or icon.
<LI>Select Properties from the menu that will pop up.
<LI>The Display Properties dialogue box will appear. Click the Settings tab at the top right. This will give you the screen shown in the picture.
<LI>Move the slider for Screen Resolution to at least 1024x768 and make sure that Color Quality is set to 32 bit.
<LI>Click the Apply button. Windows will change the setting and let you see what it will look like. To accept your changes, click the Yes button. If your monitor or video card can’t support the setting, then you won’t see anything and Windows will switch back to your old setting after 15 seconds. Lower the Resolution a little and try again.
<LI>When you’re happy with your new settings, click OK to close the window. You’re now ready for ZBrush!
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The Layout
Now that we have enough room to work, let’s take a look at the ZBrush interface. I’ll start at the most basic level – the overall layout – and then work in to the finer details.
[img]http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/zbc_uploads/user_image-1030434487hsk.jpg[/img]
At the very center of the screen is your canvas, which has a black background by default. This is where you will naturally be doing your painting. It is completely surrounded by interface items, which I will get to in their turn.
One of the first things that you’ll notice is what’s called the Float Menu, which partly covers the canvas. This is meant as a handy place to store the interface items that you use often. Choosing an item from the Float Menu is exactly the same as choosing it from the regular menus – it’s just faster.
To the left and right of the canvas are sections called Trays that go from the top of the screen to the bottom. These hold all of the different menus. See the thin vertical bar between the Trays and the canvas – the one with the orange arrows in the center of it? Clicking anywhere along the length of this bar will cause the Tray to slide off the screen to the left or right. This gives you more room for your canvas, which is very nice! Clicking again on the bar, which will now be on the very edge of the screen, will bring the Tray back.
Within each Tray are groups of interface items that share a common kind of function. These are called Palettes, and can easily be identified by the orange dot next to the Palette’s name. Some of the most common Palettes include Draw, Transform, Material, Tool and Color. If you want to think of things in Windows terms, these Palettes would be the same as the menu items at the top of most Windows programs. The advantage to doing things this way, though, is that the Palette can stay open after you’ve selected an item. That way, you can keep your most common interface items in sight rather than having to continually return to a drop down menu over and over again.
Not all Palettes will be in one of the Trays all the time. There are more available from the row of icons at the top center of the screen, above the canvas and the Float Menu. Normally, these are shown as icons, but you can also change ZBrush to display them as text instead.
The problem is that some of these Palettes get very long once you’ve opened up their submenus. In version 1.23b, this sometimes meant that you would run out of room, and portions of the Palette would disappear out of sight and become inaccessible. The new version has resolved this by making it possible to scroll the Trays vertically. When your cursor is not directly above one of the menu choices, it turns into up and down arrows to show that you can drag the Tray.
Notice the little orange arrows between the icons and the canvas? Clicking this splits your canvas area into two different views. You can actually zoom in and out of these views independently, maybe painting in one that’s zoomed in very close while keeping the other actual size to see how your work looks. By dragging the bar up or down, you can change the sizes of the views. Click the bar again to return to a single screen view.
Finally, at the bottom center of the screen, below the canvas, you have the ZScript area. This is where nearly every script that you ever load will appear, with any interface buttons, text, etc. ZScripts are an extremely powerful part of ZBrush, useful for tutorials, recording a session to be played back later by someone else, or even enhancing the capabilities of ZBrush. Eventually, you may even want to write your own scripts to do things for you automatically! And of course, you can click that divider with the arrows to hide or show the script at will. You can also drag it up or down to make the script area larger or smaller.
You should already see that ZBrush allows you to claim the majority of your valuable screen real estate for the canvas, keeping the interface out of sight until you need something from it. This takes a little getting used to, but is well worth the effort! Imagine being able to fill your screen with the canvas, only occasionally bringing up a menu for a moment before returning to the canvas to paint some more! The larger the image that you’re working on, the more you’ll appreciate the ability to hide the trays and other interface items.
The Anatomy of a Palette
Now that you have a general understanding of where to find the key items, let’s get to know the Palettes themselves a bit better. As I’ve already stated, each Palette contains a group of related interface items. The Tool Palette contains all of the things that you can paint on the canvas. The Color Palette contains your color mixers. The Transform Palette contains commands for modeling. It’s very straightforward.
[img]http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/zbc_uploads/user_image-1030434414xxr.jpg[/img]
Each Palette has its icon to the left by itself, making them easy to spot, with its name next to it. To the right are two special icons. The one on the far right, which looks like a circle with a line through it, can be used to close the Palette. Just click on it. If you click, hold, and drag, you can also move the Palette to a new location. Clicking anywhere in the title bar will collapse the Palette. This leaves it where it is in the Tray so that you can quickly return to it, but hides all of the items within the Palette so that there is room for you to open other Palettes in that Tray. Last of all is another feature new to v1.5. Right next to the “close” icon is another that looks like two pages next to each other. ZBrush offers you a choice between Basic and Advanced Palettes. The default Basic mode is great for beginners, giving you just the most commonly used features from that Palette. As you learn more about using ZBrush, you’ll want access to more options. Click this icon to make the full Palette available to you.
Digging deeper into the Palettes, you will find that many of them have a bunch of buttons followed by a gray bar with a name and a small square. This bar is a submenu, just like the cascading drop-down menus in Windows. Clicking on the bar expands the menu or closes it again, and the small square works just like the others did for the menu. But these squares will try to keep the menu AND that submenu open, rather than just the menu.
Every interface item has help text that will appear when you let your pointer hover over it for a moment. Some of these descriptions not only say what the item does, but also contain a shortcut key. Just press that key to activate the item from your keyboard, rather than having to find it in the Palettes. (A handy one to remember is “t”, which allows you to start modeling a primitive that you just drew.) Also, pressing Ctrl/Cmd while this help text is shown will give you even more information. Yet another new feature to 1.5 is the ? mark in the upper right corner. Pressing this will cause detailed descriptions of interface items to appear as you mouse over them.
A few of these submenus also contain graphs. By default, each graph is collapsed when you first see it. Clicking once expands the graph so that you can change it. The graph will then close again when another graph is opened. Only one graph can be open in ZBrush at a time. This is important to remember, since collapsing the menu or the Palette still keeps the graph open within. Sometimes you’ll find that you want to close a graph completely while still keeping that Palette open. To get rid of the offending graph, simply open one of the graphs in the Tray on the other side of the screen, and the one that was giving you grief will immediately close.
Each Palette has a default Tray that it prefers to be in. You can override this in one of two ways. If you close the other Tray, then clicking the Palette’s icon will cause it to open at the top of the remaining Tray. Alternatively, you can click and hold down the mouse button on a Palette’s Close Button, then drag it to the place in either tray that you want it to open.
Meet the Palettes
Very briefly, I’d like to take a moment to tell you the basic functions of each Palette. Many of these will be gone into in greater depth with future tutorials.
<UL TYPE=SQUARE><LI>Alpha: This Palette contains grayscale images that can be used for everything from controlling the shape of your paintbrush to masking an object during modeling or changing the properties of a material. Alphas can be used by nearly every other Palette in ZBrush. A later tutorial will definitely cover this Palette in detail, since it’s one of the most powerful in the program, but also one of the least understood by new users.
<LI>Color: Choose the primary color, and in some cases the secondary color that you want to paint with. You can select a color from one of two graphs, enter its RGB values, or even use your Operating System’s color palette.
<LI>Document: Used to load and save documents, undo and redo actions, change the canvas’s dimensions, even change the background color.
<LI>Draw: Probably the most powerful Palette and definitely the most used. This tells your brush what modes to draw in. For example, whether to paint with a material, color, or both. Whether or not to paint with depth. Whether to use a Boolean operation. How large the brush size is. You will use functions from this Palette constantly.
<LI>Edit: The smallest Palette, this one holds your Document and Tool undo and redo buttons. You can also use Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Shift+Z to do the same thing.
<LI>Layer: What would a drawing program be without layers? This Palette controls them in ZBrush – although they do behave differently from what you are probably used to from programs like Photoshop.
<LI>Light: Gives you total control over your scene’s light sources. This palette is more important than ever in version 1.5, since it also controls the new Ambient Lighting and Soft Shadows features. These radiosity settings will allow you to bring new levels of realism to your ZBrush artwork, although it does have a price of longer final render times.
<LI>Marker: Another very powerful, but little known Palette. Markers can remember practically anything about a 3D object when you draw it. This Palette controls exactly what the marker will recall when it’s activated.
<LI>Material: Every object in ZBrush can have a material assigned to it, which controls how light interacts with that object. Is the surface reflective? Shiny? Bumpy? Bright? A bunch of materials have been pre-created for you and load when you start ZBrush. Still others can be imported. You can also use the modifiers to take total control over each material and then use this Palette to save the materials that you like. Incidentally, if you’re familiar with high end packages such as Maya or Lightwave, these materials are the equivalent of shaders.
<LI>Movie: Almost a dinosaur at this point, movies have been replaced by the more powerful ZScripts.
<LI>Picker: Can’t remember exactly which color or material you used in a particular part of your scene? The Picker can help. It can also be used to do some pretty fancy stuff that is far beyond the scope of a basic tutorial.
<LI>Preferences: Use this Palette to store your preferred configuration, change the number of times you can undo while painting (Doc Undo) or modeling (Tool Undo), how close you have to be to a marker for it to show up, etc.
<LI>Render: Contains the settings for rendered effects like fog, depth cue and antialiasing. Also contains the render modes. As a rule, you’ll leave this Palette alone until you’re almost done with your scene.
<LI>Stencil: Just as its name implies, the stencil can be painted through with great precision. But it has some very unique properties such as being able to be wrapped onto a surface.
<LI>Stroke: Want to draw a straight line? A drag box? Freehand? There are several stroke types to choose from.
<LI>Tablet: If you have a graphics tablet, this Palette can help you make the most of it in ZBrush.
<LI>Texture: Wrap these onto a 3D object or paint with a texture instead of color. This Palette lets you load, save and change textures, as well as picking the one that you want to use.
<LI>Tool: Contains everything that you can paint with – 2D brushes, 2.5D brushes and 3D primitives. The name of the currently selected one is at the top of the Palette. Almost all of them have modifiers, which change according to the properties of the currently selected brush. As a result, the modifiers for the Simple Brush will be very different from those for the Ring3D! You can use this Palette to save 3D objects that you create, export them as OBJ or DXF files for use in other programs, or import such files for use in ZBrush.
<LI>Transform: This Palette contains functions used for modeling a 3D object – for example, turning a sphere into a head.
<LI>ZScript: This Palette lets you import, record, and control some of the properties of ZScripts. The more you use ZBrush, the more you’ll come to love the ZScript Palette!
<LI>Zoom: Lets you zoom in and out of the canvas, as well as scrolling to particular areas.
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Whew! That’s a lot to cover and try and remember, but don’t let it scare you off. Most of these things will be covered during the future tutorials in this series, and you’ll get a chance to use them in the course of working on projects. It’s enough for now to simply have an idea that they exist.
The Power of the Float Menu
The Float Menu can be turned on and off by simply pressing the Tab key, which means that you can have only the canvas visible, taking up your entire screen. When you want to change interface items, press Tab to bring up the Float Menu, choose what you want, and then press Tab again to make it go away. It’s much quicker and easier than having to hunt for wherever the menu is at that moment! Pixologic has given you some of the most commonly items in a default configuration, but one of the most powerful things here is that you can actually make your own. Take some time to get used to the Float Menu and make it yours. You’ll wonder how other people can work without it!
You can also use the Float Menu to open and close your main Palettes. By holding down the Alt key and clicking on an item in the Float Menu, ZBrush will open or close the Palette that the item comes from. This is another alternative to hunting around for menus, and will also speed your work up.
How do you change what’s in the Float Menu, or where it’s located? Simply use the Ctrl key. By holding down Ctrl, you can click on most interface items and drag them out onto the screen as a part of the Float Menu. You can arrange them in groups, scatter them around the screen or anything else you like. You can even take items from the existing Float Menu and move them somewhere else. To remove an item entirely, just hold down Ctrl and click once on the item rather than dragging. It will go away.
To move the entire menu around, simply click anywhere in the bar at the top of the menu and drag it to a new position.
The Float Menu takes some time to get used to, and many new users want nothing more than to be rid of it. Don’t make that mistake. Remember that the more space you have on your screen for the canvas, the more room you will have to work. The Float Menu allows you to not only reclaim a lot of the screen, but also to actually rearrange the interface to suit your own preferences. It’s amazingly useful if you give it a chance!
Yet another new 1.5 feature is the Quick Menu. When you press and release the space bar, this menu will pop up wherever your mouse pointer is located. This menu gives you instant access to all of the most commonly used features, making it easier than ever to operate with the Palettes hidden. Maya users should find this especially familiar!
Summing Up
The most important concept to remember at this point is that while each Palette controls a related group of features, they do not exist in a vacuum. They work together to varying degrees, giving you great control over your work.
And while the interface seems very complex when you first look at it, there are very simple, basic rules that everything follows. Trays contain Palettes, which contain related menus and interface items.
The accompanying ZScript is meant as a companion to this lesson. It will cover much of the same information, but will actually show you where to find things and in many cases show you how they can be used. It will also give you a chance to play with each concept as it’s introduced, becoming familiar with it before you move on to the next. Basically, it’s meant as a hands-on exercise.
:red_circle: :large_orange_diamond: :small_blue_diamond:[Download the Lesson 1 Script](http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/zbc_uploads/user_file-1030434272tyy.txt) :small_blue_diamond: :large_orange_diamond: :red_circle:
Save the script to your computer and then start ZBrush and use the ZScript Palette (normally the top Palette in the left tray) to load it. You may find it helpful to make the ZScript window a little larger so that you have room to read. Just click on the dividing line between the ZScript window and the canvas, dragging upwards.
[img]http://www2.zbrushcentral.com/zbc_uploads/user_image-1030434361ful.jpg[/img]
After you’ve run the script, try these exercises:
<UL TYPE=SQUARE><LI>Increase the number of Document and Tool undos that you can do to 25.
<LI>Add the Load ZScript button to your Float Menu.
<LI>Change the color of the borders on your Float Menu.
<LI>Change the top menu from icons to show the Palette names (this gives you more room on your canvas).
<LI>Add the Zoom slider to the Float Menu
<LI>Remove it again.
<LI>Move your palettes around.
<LI>Store your configuration so that it will return when you restart ZBrush.
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Future Lessons
This series is meant to take you as a new user through a project that will introduce you to the best that ZBrush has to offer. Each chapter will build on what has gone before, letting you learn the basics of ZBrush in bite-sized chunks. While this lesson has mostly been an introduction to what is available in ZBrush, and as such may seem a bit overwhelming, don’t worry about it! The future ones will each cover the basics of what to do with all of this stuff. Each will also take the same approach that this one has, which is to Discuss the Subject, use a ZScript to Show the Subject in Action, and then give you some exercises to Put the Subject to Work.
Please use THIS THREAD to suggest areas that you could really use help with, and would like to see a tutorial on. I will try to work them all into the series as I go. For now, however, the series is planned to follow this curriculum:
- The Interface (this lesson)
- 2.5D Painting
- Basic Modeling (3D)
- Basic Texturing
- Materials
- The Alpha Palette
- Putting it All Together
- Lighting
- Rendering
Of course, this could and probably will evolve as we go!
Please use this thread to comment on the lesson, ask questions regarding the interface, and share your own tips, tricks or discoveries. If we keep each thread dedicated to the topic at hand, then the whole series will become increasingly useful for future ZBrush users!
Thank you for your time, and I’ll see you in the next lesson!
You can be assured that this effort will become the Zbible for alot of people.
