ZBrushCentral

Multiple zsphere subtool movement problem

ZBrush Usage Questions
#21

GRIN! I misspoke there, I just meant I saved them as individual tools, not as subtools, that came after, sorry… However even if I hadent saved them I would have the same result…
So…
I Make Zsphere person
Save as tool
Make new Zsphere person
Save as tool
Append first Zsphere person (now I have two, one on top of the other)
Try to move one of them(Zspheres only, not mesh yet)
If I use CTRL and grab the root Zsphere I can move the model, BUT when I make it into the mesh it appears somewhere else (usually where the tool appended to(that was happening in the earlier stuff with the octopus)
If I use the deformation Pallet to move (again, Zspheres) the mesh explodes like in my picture…

So as you mentioned, and I think you must be right, I must be doing some other step in middle of all that that is screwing things up… the question is what, and if so where did I learn to do it…
One possibility is I picked something up from watching tutorial videos that were geared for ZBrush3.x… however I don’t know honestly.

Interestingly the stuff with the transpose tools (not just in relation to this problem) come and go, some objects deform when they should not and others work just fine, sometimes I can use the middle circle thingy to move a sphere in any direction I want and at other times it causes it to deform, I have no idea why that is but with eyes for example it often takes up to 4-5 tries to keep them round (in fact wanting to do a little sculpting on eyes is where I learned that you can’t touch PM3D button if you have subtools… why that is I don’t know, it seems natural to me to look at something and think I need another object. I can add the object but I don’t dare touch it… not fun and fairly confusing when I see all the things in ZBC with hundreds of subtools all intricately sculpted… I sit here and think HOW DID THEY DO THAT??? And then I pop a couple more eyeballs or what ever…
Speaking of which, the thing holding the octopus is going to have a whole lot of eyes and other… um… problems…

Ok… I’m starting to babble on a bit here…
I think you’re right, I must be doing something in the middle of all this that is doing something odd…

Oh yah, I will start cropping this stuff! Sorry about that!

Cheers, and Thankyou for the help!
Mealea

(my internet connection is going haywire, I dont know if this will get out)

#22

By any chance did you used radial symmetry when making your zsphere armature?

#23

heh…
Its funny you should ask that, I love that feature but in these cases no Im not.
But out of curiosity, why?
(ok… now I’m not sure, regular symmetry yes I’m almost positive, radial no, I would have had to turn that on via the transform menu not just by hitting X right???)

#24

I think you found it!
I just made two things out of Zspheres and used NO symmetry and had no real problem moving them aside from rotate in the deformation menu being weird (Fixable I think as Marcus said using the Unify button, I will test that now…)
Hang on…
one more little test!

#25

ok yes.
Symmetry SEEMS to be destroying my mesh.
Unify is good BUT you have to unify ALL subtools, unifying one does nothing its just unifyied to it self… or something or… ok I dont even know what I just said…But still unify on both tools and they move, rotate and turn into mesh as normal…
ok… one last test…

#26

Here’s my theory…he heh. theory. 2 separate problems.

  1. you are moving and rotating subtools while in preview mode. You may not notice you are doing this if you are accustomed, like me, to flipping back and forth between the two modes. It just has to happen once and you’ve moved off your connection. I did it myself in testing and I didn’t realize I did it…took forever to catch myself at it.

  2. When you attempt to move with transpose tools, expecially that octopii with all its legiliscious parts, I’m guessing it got jumbled up and some little sphere went inside where you couldn’t see it. Or you inadvertantly tapped on the model in draw mode thinking you were in move mode and you created a tiny zsphere that you didn’t notice which got moved inside. That will cause an explosion or serious deformation. Its tricky to get the hang of moving the whole zsphere mesh with the transpose tools. I practice it alot. You need to be sure you are clicking on the root sphere while holding down ctl - hold and drag. If you don’t do it right, be sure to undo with ctl z - don’t try to rearrange the parts. Then try try again! :lol:

#27

ok…
now I cant replicate it.
I did everything the same as the Bubblebutt and NippleNut example and it worked as it should have, I can move them rotate them etc…and make meshes out of them…
Now the question is what changed…?

#28

hehehehe…
/me goes bat****…
Ok Yes to everything mostly!
Octopi’s root Zsphere is internal but that wasent it, more on that in a second…
you said:
“you are moving and rotating subtools while in preview mode. You may not notice you are doing this if you are accustomed, like me, to flipping back and forth between the two modes.”
VERY VERY Likely. But maybe only one of what looks like a number of problems and they led to more confusion and obscured what was ACTUALLY happening… I think…

It seems that I need to hit the UNIFY button on ALL subtools,
That radially alters the size and placement of things but solves two problems, movement (size rotation and placement) and making mesh out of my Zspheres. If each subtool is “unified” everything works nicely. I think… at least it seemed to just a moment ago…

holy shi… AHEM… stuff.

–EDIT Forgot about the octopi comment, its in the center and I moved it slightly so I could get at it, I don’t THINK, but I cant be sure of that now as there are SO MANY COPIES! (microscopic ZSpheres are microscopic thus hard to find)

PHEW!
The question now is why symmetry led to unity… and on that note I’m making a VERY strong drink.
And I suspect I owe you one.

#29

“legiliscious parts”

hehehehehehehehehe!!!

#30

I’m going to join you in that drink! And symmetry was just a thought. Possibly when it gets left on when its not needed, things go wonky, like with transpose move, etc…just a possibility, I haven’t been able to get good results testing it.

I use unify for all my subtools as a starting point. I’m not even sure that’s what it’s purpose is, but it helps with getting things positioned from a central place.

#31

I am now having trouble replicating my own problem…
I’m not sure what is going on here…
very very very odd…

I think what I am going to do is start over from scratch and see what happens.
My thought is that you were right when you said maybe I was doing an extra step somewhere and in maybe starting over and keeping track of what I’m doing should help.

the tests I’m doing are little ten second things where as things like the Octopus and the thing holding him are a bit more involved… well in theory just more ZSpheres but still…

ok… more soon as something either works right or breaks!

GRIN!

#32

Inevitably when I’m starting out with some new process in Zbrush I incorporate some little thing that breaks the workflow and its hard to pin down…suddenly the bad habit is gone. Happens to me all the time. Often I never discover what I was repeatedly doing wrong.

Conduct a test and wiggle a zsphere or two inside and then press A to see it bork.

I’d recommend also that you get the basic forms down and positioned and committed before you add little details like small zspheres for facial features. Just as a procedure it may greatly help avoid the risk of dragging a zsphere inside. I’m going to do this from now on.

Thanks, btw for the link to the tutorial vid on creating an personalized interface. That’s an excellent tutorial and I benefited from watching it again. I worked out a menu palette which serves nicely for my needs…and in the process brought up ANOTHER issue which I’ll post in the troublemakers…er troubleshooting forum. :lol:

#33

You’re welcome and Thank You!

Its very odd, I’m still having trouble in a wide range of ways with subtools, I find them nearly unmanageable. They jump around, destroy each other and themselves and generally drive me nuts…
Am I correct in thinking that you cant link them if you want to move a bunch at once?
I seem to have no concept of the way these are supposed to work, how I am supposed to use them in relation to each other, or why any of the things they do happens at all.
A good example of this is making a boooleen, I did it once and have never been able to do it again.
I think that there ought to be a bit of background information about these things explaining not just: do this then this, and now do that, but WHY you do it in some particular way.

On the plus side, at some point its all going to click somewhere deep down inside all that swirling stagnated air in the bottom of my head and something will ignite. At that point I will need more memory and who knows what else… oh, LOTS of coffee!!!

GRIN!

#34

I think the subtool master may be just the ticket for what you are trying to accomplish. That said, I haven’t yet explored it’s mysteries…just going by heresay.

And Booleens :rolleyes:

They are so dang fussy! I had the same experience as you Mealea, did it ONCE and then I couldn’t repeat the experience. But it’s funny you are mentioning it now. Last night I was playing around with them. I noticed its very easy to think you’ve set things up and when you don’t like your result and delete the resulting subtool to try again, its easy for the settings to revert back…wrong axis…wrong subtool now selected, etc. annoying.

Just be sure you have all the axis greyed out (any thing on an axis is too fussy for someone just learning this and x seems to pop back on randomly) and confirm that the tool being acted on is the one selected. I keep it at the top of the subtool list. I’m not sure if that is necessary. Then its a matter of figuring out the best resolution for the resulting mesh and getting everything lined up correctly.

#35

boolean.jpg

The name of this picture is “if I can do it, you can, too!”

Process:

I drew out a cube and put it into edit/makepolymesh
I added a cylinder as a subtool
I hit unify on each of the above (I don’t think it did anything in this case)
I resized the cylinder using deformation palette so I wouldn’t make anything wonky
I duplicated the cylinder and rotated it 90 degrees

The Cube was going to be “acted upon” so it was at the top of the stack and overlapped double white circles/boolean add icon was pressed.

Depending on which outcome, I then either set the remaining “actors” to add (same as above) or the other two options - subtract and difference.

I took a wild guess at the resolution and smoothing settings and made certain x, y and z were greyed out before I pressed remesh all since I only wanted the simple effect on the top subtool without mirroring in any direction. (I’m guessing mirroring is what these axis buttons do…someone chime in if I’m wrong here).

Any subtools that are not visible will not effect the remesh.

Edit to add that I may mis-spoke in that photo. I’m pretty sure that isn’t UNION but actually INTERSECTION as the correct terminology/action.

#36

This is so weird!!!
It works, but only 1/2 the time… I can do EXACTLY the same thing twice or more and one time I will have nice holes or things added together, and the next Zbrush informs me that i am trying to create something with Zero Geometry, or in other cases just crashes…
Here is something very odd and cool, I haven’t tried using the Boolean stuff due to crashing for a while, actually since before a number of windows updates, a couple of those informed me that some problems had been fixed, you know that thing that claims Microsoft is going to try to fix what ever crashed you? It might be more than a placebo!

But wait! Theres More!
I got Subtool Master and I’m trying it out now, some things seem to work right off (yay!), and others I think I need to read up on, I wish I could just add objects, move them around at will and link and unlink them like I would in other stuff I am used to. I think that the only reason I cant is that I just don’t know how yet and thats mostly I suspect because its called something other than what I am expecting. (Unify for example does not seem to do much other than send all things to one place and make them the same size, I’m not sure what the unity part is in that but its certainly… odd)

Im learning too many things too fast and yet I want more…

#37

If you are getting that zero geometry warning I can guarantee that one of the axis got inadvertantly highlighted or your selected subtool switched. For me, every time I process a boolean, x highlights again and/or the wrong tool is selected. So I’ve gotten in the habit of always checking those axis and subtools highlight before pressing Remesh all and I’m no longer plagued by that dreaded warning.

You are ahead of me on learning subtool master. I’m confident it does all and more you’d expect, and I know what you mean about the terminology getting in the way of learning this stuff easily.

What was that saying about a puzzle inside a riddle inside an enigma?..

#38

“puzzle inside a riddle inside an enigma…”
Let me see here…
Ahha!
Terduckin!
Its when you shove a chicken up a turkey and then shove a duck up the chicken and cook the whole nasty thing all at once. Some how I suspect a redneck influence in this discovery.

Subtool master is interesting, I think its basically a different way of looking at the same thing but I don’t know yet. In some cases the buttons are seriously obvious, in others Im still figuring them out, but the obvious ones are great. Picture wanting to change one subtools color or material and having it happen instead of having to beat the stuffing out of the “Fill Object” button in the color menu, its rather nice (if I have two tools in the subtool menu I often have to hit the fill button a dozen or so times while switching back and forth between tools before it seems to stick).
So that thing is cool!
Thank you!

It also brought up the subject of the other “master” thingys and so I pounced on the one Im constantly bumping by acciddent, the Projection Master.
THAT THING IS AWESOME, and very distracting!

#39

Well this has been a heck of a week…
I think I am starting to see my problem and its got me a bit confused, it happens in 2.5D and 3D.
What is going on is almost like some part of the third dimension is missing, like you can rotate something 359 degrees and when you are almost to 360 it whips around to 0. Or something…
I have been seeing this for a while, since I started using Zbrush actually. I first noticed it when (and this still drives me nuts) what I am working on gets stuck upside down. I have to sit there and carefully rotate it 90 degrees at a time till it stops flipping 180 and then I can get it facing in the direction I want.
Even more interesting is that this does not happen in Sculptris, if I rotate something in Sculptris it just rotates, I dont have to think about it or put any work into it, it just does what I expect it to.
How this is effecting Subtools Im not sure, but I can show quite clearly there is some sort of issue here with a picture.
Does any of this make any sense at all?

directionalIssue.jpg

This is a simple example, each of the two circles were drawn in the direction of the rather poorly drawn arrows, as you can see there is a point where Zbrush flips out and spins the brush (that cylinder at the bottom) back around to I’m guessing 0 degrees.
This happens with everything on all three axises (2.5D and 3D) and its taken me a long time to realize what I am seeing.
There are other oddity’s like the more depth (in and out in relating to the surface of my monitor) the smaller my work area becomes till its a tiny dot in the center…

Is it me, Zbrush or both?

GRIN!

#40

Are you rotating via the Deformation palette, polymesh transform lines or the 2.5 D multicircle widget when this happens? I can’t seem to duplicate what’s happening, but I may not be understanding the problem you hare having.