Intro to ZBrush 005 - ZTool, ZProject, and Quicksave - file handling, and what type is best to save!

so we already know in a zbrush session that your tools are always available to you anything you've worked on you can always go back and get however what if you close out of zbrush if you close out of zbrush you will lose what you're working on if it isn't saved now to talk about saving in zbrush let's do a little exercise what i'm going to do is i'm going to have this object selected the one we've been sculpting on i'm going to go up here to clone and that's going to give me two identical versions of my object now one's going to have undo history and the other one isn't going to have undo history another thing i can do is i can go up here to copy tool and then i can hit paste tool and that'll also give me essentially a clone now those actually serve different functions one of these is going to clone a subtool and the other one's going to copy an entire tool stack with subtools we haven't gotten subtools yet but i'll explain that more when we get there so now we have three different versions of this tool so let's go ahead and select one and we'll go ahead and we'll go ahead and sculpt oh i guess i should explain this so as we're sculpting on here i went over here i tapped s on my keyboard and i made my draw size very big you can also go up here and increase and decrease your draw size when we talk about brush basics we'll get more into that but essentially what i'm trying to do is make two very or three very distinct objects here so here's one i'm going to click on this one here and this time i'm going to hold down alt and i'm going to sculpt and that's going to put in large divots in my object here and we'll finally go down to this last one here and this time i'm going to hold down shift and we're going to smooth our object so now we have a very smooth object we have a very lumpy object then we got a very cratered tool so i've worked on three different tools in this one zbrush session that we've sat down and done let's say you know what the smooth one and the cratered one i don't really like i do want to keep this one however all you need to do is make sure this one is selected in your tool palette so it's the one you're currently working on you can go up here to tool save as and you can save this anywhere the default location c program files pixel logic zbrush 2021 z tools and this is on a pc i'm not sure where this is on the mac but if you save it in here let's go ahead and rename this sphere test i'm going to go down here and hit save and what that did is save this as a z tool a dot ztl file now if i close out a zbrush right now i will have saved the z tool i can bring this in later it's going to have all the information i need however i will lose these two if i want to save all three of these as separate tools what you'll have to do is either select this tool and go up here to save as tool save as and then save it and then go over here and save this one as sphere test crater select this tool going here to save as sphere test smooth and now all three of these have been saved you'll also notice all of their names have been changed when you went in here and saved them it renamed them for you now there's a caveat to that once we get into sub tools but for now just know that when you save the tool if you only have one tool and in this case it's just a sphere it'll rename it for you so for now let's go ahead and close out of our zbrush session so let's click this x in the upper right hand corner and it's going to ask you do you want to save changes to your zbrush project before closing now zbrush projects we're going to get to in just a second but i'm going to hit no go ahead and restart zbrush you see zbrush starts up and you're also going to notice that startup material has defaulted to matcab gray now by default your lightbox may pop up if you want to again hit the comma key on your keyboard or just click this light box button in the upper left hand corner so now let's go and grab those spheres we were working on you can go in here to load tool so we have our tool menu we're going to load a tool that we saved so previously we've gone to tool save as now we're going to load a tool it probably defaulted back to that c program files folder if we sort by date modified you're going to see here's the spheres that we saved test test crater test smooth now if i want to load all of these i can hold down shift and select these or tap the first one and then shift select the bottom one and it'll select all of these then go ahead and hit open and now you're going to see we have our all of our spheres loaded so if i want to go back here to this one we can just tap that one to select it make it the current tool drag it on our canvas go into edit mode and now you can see we can continue sculpting on our object if we want to sculpt on any of our other ones we can go here to the crater we can hold down alt sculpt on our object we can go back to the smooth one hold down shift and continue to smooth on it of course you don't have to smooth this one you can sculpt on it if you'd like or hold down alt or hold down shift to smooth again we'll get into brushes in a bit but that's essentially how tools work in zbrush you can sculpt on a polymesh3d and if you want to save your progress you can go in here to tool save as and save as a tool now because we saved it in this particular location there's a cool thing you can do if you go in here to the comma key you're going to see we have project tab selected by default if we go over here to the tool tab when we save those tools it threw them right in here so if we want to load those up all we have to do is double click in here or you can double click on anything in here like for instance the dog z tool just double click that hit the comma key to go out of lightbox and now we have a dog z tool loaded up in our scene it's already a polymesh3d it's not a primitive there's no primitive settings for a dog nc brush so you can go through here and you can just start sculpting on the dog and just like we were when we were working on our spheres if you want to save your progress of what you've sculpted on your dog make sure you go up here to tool save as and then save it as you don't want to save over the dog if you if you double click dog z tool it's going to save this version over the default dog that's in there in fact if you have a folder in your computer you want to save to you'll want to save it to your lightbox folder you can always go in here it says put on your desktop and you can click here and you can say name it something and now on your desktop you'll have a z tool of a dog now you may be thinking well other programs i can hit ctrl s and if you hit ctrl s it will go to a save dialog however if you look down here it's going to say zpr if we cancel out of that and do tool save as you're going to see that's a ztl this is a z tool if you hit control s that's going to be a z project so let's go ahead and cancel out of that where z project is is underneath file save as the default is control s that's going to save a z project so now a z tool as you've already seen is just a simple asset saving so if you want to save your dog and you want to save what you sculpted and you want to save anything basically anything you've done in this menu like poly paint sculpting layers sub tools that's going to be a z tool if you want to save all of the tools you've worked on in this session so you have multiple things open if you go up here to file save as that's going to save a z project so let's call this test and now let's again close out a zbrush we'll say no we don't want to save because we've already saved our project we're going to open zbrush backup and let's go ahead and hit our comma key now if i go in here to file open let's go to our desktop here's our test z project if we double click that that's going to have the dog we were working on it saved the camera angle even that we save the project as and all of our other z tools are available to us so you may ask well why would i ever not want to save a z project well generally speaking i rarely save z projects what i usually do is if i'm working on the dog and i'm sculpting the dog and once i'm done i don't need all this other stuff in my scene usually it's just the dog and the sub tools associated with the dog that i care about so in that instance i'm going to go to tool save as and save all that as my dog file however if you do want to save your dog z tool and all the other z tools and your camera angle and your material settings and your lighting settings and your render settings file save as is what you're going to want if you're just saving out a sculpt or an asset that you're working on tool save as is usually enough as you get more comfortable in zbrush and how the files system works probably you'll resort to saving a z tool but if you want you can always go up here to file save as and save a z project z projects will probably be a little heavier especially if you have a bunch of stuff over here that you don't aren't necessarily going to want to use so generally speaking i tell people tool save as is usually what you want to get used to now one caveat with a z project if we hit the comma key and we go in here to the tool tab it's like oh you know what let's bring in this demo soldier so i'm going to double click on this and no problem i have my demo soldier and i also have my dog working all the spheres that i've been working on and the demo soldier however if i click the comma key and i go in here to project and i want to open up maybe the demo anime head if i double click it it's going to tell me i'm going to basically get rid of everything over here in your tool palette because i'm opening up a z project when zbrush opens a z project it wants to remove everything else out of your scene it's assuming that everything in the z project is all you want to see and all you want to load into zbrush so if i click no it's going to open the demo anime head i've got it available to me but i've lost everything else so again if you want a little more flexibility loading in the z tool so our desktop dog working z tool we can double click this we still have our anime head and we have our dog working and if we go back to our see program files pixelated zbrush 2021 z tools menu i can load up the sphere test we did and i can even click in the comma key basically bring in any z tool that i want double click it hit the comma key again and now we're just loading up a bunch of z tools but again if we hit the comma key go into project and we'll load up that demo anime head again it's just going to blow everything else away now there's a caveat to that if you go up here you're going to see there is a load tools from project so at any point if somebody sent you a z project and you're like i i want to keep my current session i want to keep the z tools i'm working on but i also want to load in somebody else's work and they gave me a z project all i have to do is go to load tools from project and we'll go to our desktop we'll load up our z project we save our test c project this is going to have our dog our z sphere and here's our anime head that we loaded in earlier so that's a way you can get around having to delete everything before loading up a project you can just go up here to load tools from project now there's another file you can save out of zbrush and that's a document save as that's going to save a zbr file or your document file essentially your document is going to be your camera angle any material settings that you've had and any lighting information you've had if i'm saving that type of information like my materials my lighting and my camera i'm just going to go up here to file save as and save a z project rarely these days do i ever go into document save as but i figured i'd bring it up now i don't want to confuse anybody but you can also go in here to file save as to save a z project you can also go down here to canvas and say save as to save a document you can also go in here to tool save as to save a z tool so instead of going in here to tool save as or document save as you can go in here to file choose canvas or tool and that'll go ahead and save it as well now there's other things you can save in here that we'll get to possibly in a bit depending on how relevant it is to an intro class but just what you're starting out project and tool are the big file formats that you'll really need to worry about to save your progress from here on out probably 99 of the time i'm going to tell you to go up here to tool save as and save on your progress so if we go through here and we hold down alt and we kind of push in and we start sculpting and we want to save our progress i'm going to say go up here to tool save as and save your progress as a z tool but for now i'll go ahead and hit cancel now speaking of saving progress and saving files there's one thing i want to bring your attention and that's this quick save button up here you're going to see when i hover over that you can see the hotkey is nine so if you hit nine on your keyboard that'll go ahead and run a quick auto save if you want to see where those are hit comma key on your keyboard or click the light box button and then go all the way over here to the right where it says quick save if you click on that you're going to see you have a bunch of different save files in there and you'll also notice there's z projects so what that means is whenever you hit quick save it's going to save your camera settings all the tools you have available over here any material or lighting settings basically a snapshot of your zbrush session so very very useful you also notice if you click on these actual files you're going to see this is where those are stored on your computer so if you navigate to that folder see user's public document zbrush data 2021 and go in here to quick save you see here's our z projects and right now they're not very big they're about 10 meg to 20k however you can start working on files that get pretty big in zbrush the reason i bring that up is if you go in here to preferences and scroll down to where it says quick save there's a couple settings in here you need to be made aware of the first one is maximum duration essentially while you're working in zbrush it's going to save every 20 minutes regardless of what's going on so if you're in the middle of sculpting it's going to run a quick save now depending on file size that you're working on and the computer speed that you're using this could just be a quick blip or it could kind of take you out and kind of be annoying i tend to leave this at 20 minutes but if you want to play it safe and you're working on smaller faster saving files you can lower this if you're working on heavier files and you find that that's a little bit annoying maybe you want to raise this up a little bit beneath that you're going to see restoration essentially this is telling zbrush if i'm ever not touching zbrush if i went to the bathroom or getting something to eat or walk away from my keyboard for a minute go ahead and run a quick save for me and you're going to see it set to one which is literally one minute of no zbrush use it'll do a quick save now going back to that file size your max quicksave files is set to a thousand that means it's going to store a thousand quick saves before it goes and starts deleting your old ones depending on the files that you're working on and how heavy they are this can add up fast so if you're limited on hard drive space you may want to set this to a more reasonable number i usually keep it around 50. and again anytime i change anything in my configuration preferences i change this to 50 i'm going to go back up here to the top underneath preferences config hit store config and hit ok now going back to that restoration this may have happened you already if you leave zbrush alone for a minute number one it's going to run a quick save and number two it's also going to throw a screen saver on essentially if zbrush is just sitting on your computer and you're not using it it's going to replace zbrush with user work if you don't like that go ahead and again just turn screen saver off go back up here to config hit store config and then ok incidentally if zebra server crashes while you're using it this quick save area in your light box is where your recovery files are be so you'll have a recovered z tool a recovered z document and a recovered z project just click comma key or go to your light box go to quick save and you can load up any any crash files i rarely lose work in zbrush even if it crashes i can usually go right back in here double click on that recovery z tool and i'm good to go let's go ahead and hit the comma key

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 7,517

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush ztool, zbrush zproject, zbrush quicksave, quicksave, zproject, ztool, zdoc, zbrush polymesh3D, zbrush tool palette, zbrush save, zbrush files, zbrush file types, zbrush quicksave preferences, quicksave location, zbrush ztl, zbrush zpr, ztl, zpr, zbrush lightbox

Id: rEIoFEEgS80

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021