Hi all,
I’m just sitting down for the first time and trying Zbrush out…I’m having problems with panning, zooming and orbiting around my object. It’s easy if you’ve got empty space around your object, but when I zoom right I can’t access any of the view controls. How do I move the view/camera around when I’m zoomed into the object?
I’ve done a search for zoom, pan, orbit, view, camera etc, but I can’t find anything, any info would be appreciated.
M
If you scale your object really large, its geometric center can end up going off the canvas. While in Edit mode, the simplest solution is to activate Transform>Local Edit. This causes ZBrush to treat the last edited point as the new center for scaling, rotation and movement.
Here are the controls when in Edit mode:
Alt+click and drag on the canvas 
moves the object
Alt+click on the canvas+release Alt and then drag on the canvas scales the model larger or smaller.
Drag on the canvas with no keys pressed rotates the model
Sometimes, you can accidentally lose your model off the canvas. This is easy to deal with. Exit Edit mode and then draw the model again.
Another way to interact with your model is via the Gyro. For more information, read the Transform Palette chapter in the manual, or run the Gyro section of the Primers tutorial that is included in the default ZScript (seen when you launch ZBrush).
The reason why you are finding no reference to panning, tilting, etc. is that ZBrush (like any other paint program) has a fixed camera. It cannot be interacted with in the way that you would in an animation package. You need to act on the model, rather than on the camera. However, there are some things that you can do; again like you would expect with other paint packages:
To zoom the view of the canvas Press + or - on your keyboard.
To zoom to actual size press 0
To pan across the canvas hold the spacebar, then click and drag on the canvas.
To activate half size antialiased mode press ctrl+0
These are keyboard shortcuts for the controls in the Zoom palette.
In addition, ZBrush offers a really neat feature knows as Tilde scrolling. If you hold down the tilde key (~), then click and drag on the canvas you will move the canvas itself (as opposed to your view of the canvas). What makes this great is that what scrolls off one side of the canvas comes back on the opposite side. This is very useful for creating seamless textures.
Ahah!
many thanks, I had the wrong concept in my head. Once I started thinking of it like a 2D package it all made sense.
M