045 ZBrush Custom Interface and Menus

so we've talked about hotkeys and that's essentially just assigning hotkeys and things you use all the time and for me that's usually brushes or sometimes of doing like a color fill object another really cool option in ZBrush is the interface itself and using that to set up custom menus like I have here so if I select I'm polymesh3d drag that out go into edit mode and I click my hotkey that I have assigned to a menu remember when you're assigning hotkeys you can assign a hotkey to pretty much anything in the ZBrush interface so if you want to assign a custom menu or any menu to a hockey control alt tap it assign your hotkey and then no matter where you use that hockey it's gonna be like a marking menu in Maya so you can see I have three sub menus underneath my main menu so here's my path custom and then I have modified topology menu I have a poly model menu and I have AZ spheres menu now you're gonna see nothing's in the Z spheres menu because I have a polymesh3d select it so when I go here I have options available to me but see Sears doesn't all I got to do is switch to a ZZZ fear and then I can go to my path custom now you're gonna see my Z sphere menu is full of stuff that I use when I use these spheres you also notice over here on the right-hand side my list is gonna be a lot shorter than yours and down here at the bottom I've got some extra stuff so how do we set all this up the first I'm going to do is I'm going to go into preferences here I'm gonna take this menu and dock it over above my tool menu and this brush menu over here if you double click these dividers that will open up those dividers go ahead and touch that white dot and get rid of the brush menu over here so let's talk about your interface first so under preferences you're gonna see there's a custom UI option and under config you're gonna see there's an enable customize so we're gonna use both of these things to make our custom menu but if you click enable customize you're gonna see my interface changes a little bit so when I turn that off it snaps back and I turn it on it snaps back again so now your interface is customisable ready so if you want to move things around your interface like say you want the live boolean button moved over all you got to do is hold down ctrl if you just touch it it's just gonna turn my boolean on if you hold down control alt with enable customized turned on you can move these buttons around now if you don't want it at all it's like you know what I have a hockey assign of this I'm never gonna go up here and click this button I can go ahead and just control I'll drag it right into my interface here if you were like oh oops I need to bring that button back number one because we haven't gone up to config and stored config if you restart ZBrush none of this is gonna be saved so after you're done customizing everything what you're gonna want to do is store config but if you haven't done that yet you can shutdown ZBrush restart it and everything will be back to normal however all we got to do is go over here to render I'm gonna drag this render menu over here so I can dock it under render boolean's you see we have the live boolean button there if we want to put that back all you go to do is ctrl alt drag it from this menu then we got our button back so you can kind of snap it here you're gonna see when we're moving this thing around it'll kind of snap itself into place and let's say you're hopping in a key shot quite a lot you want the key shot button available so you can hold down control and you can put that key shot button right here now essentially what I did over here in this menu if we open up document for example I don't move my document around a lot so when L this you know a scroll was over here and zoom and actual in any aliased half they were all up here I just held down control I'll just drag them into my document they just disappeared they're still there the functionality is still available to you I'm just not having this side over here cluttered also if you're working on a small monitor your solo button may be out of sight speaking of solo this might not be the best place to put this but I should go ahead talk about it so when you hit the solo button in there preferences if you go to the Edit menu there is a allow click to solo if you hold down ctrl it'll tell you that the solo button will activate when you left mouse click on the document I accidentally left mouse click on the document all the time so this isn't very useful to me but if you're used to just clicking in the document to go into solo mode you can enable that I prefer to just go over here and click the solo button because it's usually on the way over to the tool menu anyways if you want to assign a hotkey to that you can do that as well now let's talk about these materials and brushes down here so if we want to dock those things we can do is you go over here to brush menu and you can see we have a bunch of brushes over here at this brush menu and so every time you select and we have a Z sphere selected let me go ahead and go down to our tool select a polymesh3d again and now i have a lot more budget brushes available to me so if you're constantly over here choosing new brushes like so it's gonna keep adding these brushes if you want to clear this out you can hit this r key and then i'll go ahead it's not gonna delete any brushes it's just gonna kind of clean this menu up a little bit let's say I go into my brush palette here and I always am using this magnified brush so I'm gonna select the magnifying you're gonna see it puts the magnified brushes the selected brush now if I go back here to curve standard or whatever brush they're gonna see I have a small version of the magnifying brush if I dock this palette this big pallet brush right here if I hold down ctrl alt and dock that somewhere that's just going to be another instance of this brush palettes when I click on it it's just gonna click on the brush palette it's not gonna select that brush it's going to control I'll drag that in here what I want is this little one this little magnify one if I hold down ctrl alt and drag this down here that's going to select the magnify my want to use it so if you don't see your brush in here just go in here and collect select that will do clay and then clay buildup and then Claire curved tube snap and then H polish or whatever you want to put in there and then once you selected them all now you can go back in here grab their little icons like H polish and we can put that down here and those will be available to you so whenever you touch these it will switch you to that brush now for the materials it's the same thing we're gonna go turn off the brush menu here we'll go into the material menu and again every time you select a material it'll start building them up right here so now I got a bunch of little materials I can choose from like a madcap grin skin shader for I use a lot if you're always using in a normal map you can just control I'll drag this down here you don't have to drag them down here you can put them here you can put them up here in the interface a lot of different places for you to kind of shove these things now if you're happy with your setup here just turn off enable customize go up here to preferences config hit this store config button and it'll tell you every time you start up ZBrush it's gonna look just like you left it now if I go over here and I grab my path custom menu and I put it over here we open up all the menus over here you're gonna see I have a bunch of buttons from all over the ZBrush interface and a custom menu so let's talk about how to make a custom menu let's go ahead and close that out let's go back to preferences config and it will customize when I turn that on you're gonna see create new menu button is ungrate and i'm able to use it and you have all these filler buttons in here and a custom sub palette button so click the create new menu and you go ahead and title it call it test demo and what it's going to do first is it's gonna throw demo right here at the very end however if you touch it and then untouched it's gonna put it back into alphabetical order so now it's over here on the t's so take this white circle drag it over here in your dock and now you have a test demo menu you can start putting stuff in I like to keep things a little bit organized so I'm gonna take a custom sub palette menu ctrl alt drag it on here you can retitle this but in order to retitle this if you hold down ctrl alt on tap it's not gonna do anything yet you have to put something in there first so let's take stuff we use a lot so we'll go down to our tool menu here we'll go to geometry and again if you wanted to put Z sphere things into here you have to have as easier to select it and now you have a bunch of Z sphere options you can go down here to like rigging and say I want to select mesh and put that in there however if I switch back to polymesh3d you're gonna see it's gonna disappear because it's context-sensitive it's still sitting there so if we select the Z sphere again it'll come back so that's why I like to have my context context sensitive stuff for Z spheres and its own menu but that's just kind of like a personal preference so anyway if we decide now you know what I don't want select mesh and they're gonna put that in its own menu I'm gonna hold down ctrl alt and drag it over here then that'll go ahead and empty that out so I'll go back to our polymesh3d we'll go to like say clay polish and say we could use clay polish or lots let's drag that button in there and we'll go down here to zremesher and we zremesher lot so we'll just do that and I want to keep you know if I want to keep this thing organized it's like you know what I've got zremesher options in here so we'll put zremesher and keep groups and underneath this we'll turn put our target polygon count in here maybe our adaptive size go up here to dynamesh we can throw our dynamesh button in there and if it goes below it all I got to do is take this adaptive size drag it above and then it'll force that down if you want to get really creative or you need to organize in very specific ways like say you want to put a sub in here and it and and and you want to have it I know these are diagonal from each other for some reason you can always go back to your preferences menu where these filler buttons are and you can just drag those in there you go so now those will be filler so if we go up here and turn off enable customize you're gonna see that's the look we're gonna get and now we have a custom test demo menu so now that I've put things in here I can hold down ctrl alt and tap oh because we don't have an able customize on I control all tap this is gonna want to sign a hot key turn on enable customize and now when I control I'll tap the submenu it allow me to retitle this thing so we'll call this clay Dyna so that'll be my sub pallet sub menu here and you can go ahead and collapse that as needed so if we want to put in another sub palette here we can go custom sub palette now instead of trying to drop it down here I'm gonna drop it right on the very top menu here and that'll automatically force it down here to the bottom now let's say oh you know what I really wish this sub palette was above this one now I'm not certain there's a way to do that we can turn that right now it the previous version of ZBrush yeah so if you drop a sub palette into a sub palette it's gonna drop it down into a sub sub palette if you drop it into your main menu it'll drop a new menu down here so it's kind of dependent on what you want to do I'll drag that one out but if you do want these in a particular order I would say go ahead and maybe mock up in a document or something like how you want to organize so when you go to create your palettes you can do it in order because I don't know that there's a way to reorder these so anyway we've got this one open let's go ahead and I guess we can just dock this so we want lighting stuff in here you can say you know what let's do their light properties although some light properties in here and then let's throw some material stuff in here lighting materials and rendering all kind of go together so these are materials I want to use I don't need the material palette in there but let's say I want to put skin shader 4 in here and chalk now you see how it's kind of getting weird in here just hold down control all done just force these things to behave how you want to and let's go ahead and grab the rendering rendering menu here go to render properties and let's throw maybe shadows vibrant a mean occlusion in there okay so we're happy with this menu let's go ahead and name it ctrl alt call it rendering so now you have a test demo menu with a clay dyna-dude sub menu or rendering sub menu and a bunch of custom buttons in there go ahead and turn off enable customize you can go ahead and close this out and you can see right here there's our test demo menu under preferences you probably want to hit store config and if you want you can hold down ctrl alt since we've turned off and it will customize hold down ctrl alt loops go to test demo that's the sign of hotkey - this will say alt o hockey has been assigned success - no and over I hit alt o wherever my brush is that menu will pop up and you can go in here and you can close these menus down so whenever if you don't you're not using those menus a lot you can just hit alt o and it'll stay closed because they're just referring back to how your test demo is set up if you want it open just make sure you hold down shift and you have multiple ones open you can hold down shift and open all the menus and then just use this as your a little custom menu right here

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 62,389

Keywords: zbrush custom interface, zbrush interface, zbrush menus, zbrush custom menus, zbrush preferences, zbrush config, zbrush store config, zbrush enable customize, zbrush customize, zbrush hotkeys, zbrush custom, zbrush custom menu

Id: JL7EHprf6Y4

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018