Intro to ZBrush 025 - Gizmo Functionality! Setting pivots, resetting orientation, and more!!

so in our last video we touched on two very important topics which is gizmo and subtools let's talk a little bit more about those let's go back into our palette here and let's choose a cylinder 3d this time we've initialized that to put a hole in the middle we can go ahead and get rid of that let's go down here to initialize take that inner radius and turn it down to zero so now we just have a cylinder and let's immediately go up here to make polymesh3d so we have this as a piece of geometry now you see when we do that it makes it a pm3d cylinder now if we go over here and we do append or insert these are ways to get more tools into this session with this other tool this is going to be very useful as you start building more and more complex scenes but we'll start simple for now and one easy way to get other subtools is just to take this and go down here and hit duplicate that'll take this tool and make an exact copy now right now they're right on top of each other so if i hit ctrl w on this one give it a new polygroup you're going to see it's going to turn red if i go down here to solo mo you'll see solo mode you'll see it and then if i touch this one here it's going to turn green because this is the red polygroup one this is the green polygroup one if i turn off solo mode essentially because the verts are right on top of each other you're probably just going to see one or the other that you have selected however right now we're in draw mode if i hit w that's going to put us into move and then if i go over here to scale that's e and rotate is r so w e r is move scale and rotate now those will come in handy when we use the alternative method of the gizmo 3d which is the transposed line so if you hit y or you touch this button that's going to turn gizmo off and that's going to turn into this little transpose line right here there's a lot of really cool things you can do with this transpose line but for now let's go ahead and turn off y and we'll just stick with the gizmo so whether you hit w e or r usually i'll just hit w to bring up gizmo you can move scale and rotate and you're going to see that's because all of the functionality is built right into this gizmo so if i grab this red line right here and pull that's going to rotate if i do the green line that's going to rotate in this direction in the y top down direction if i do the blue line that's going to be in the z direction same thing with moving if i grab this blue arrow i can move it out here to the side and then i can rotate if i want and you can also hold down shift if you want to snap to increment so this will snap in five degree increments here and then when you're moving if you hold down shift that's going to snap it to 0.1 increments so you can be very precise while you're moving now if you want to know more or have go into the preferences here and go to gizmo 3d you can change your gizmo size your modifiers lengths and that's actually if you go in here to the gizmo and you say choose deformer that's going to be these cone lengths right here we're not quite there yet so just hit w to go out of that gear mode but you know just so you're aware of that you can hit this gear icon and there's a lot of really cool things in here uh and if you get in that state where you see a lot of stuff you don't understand just hit w and then i'll go back to gizmo mode here so now you're also going to see you have these white arrows out here on the corners and then this white circle around the outside of all your other rotational axes here's your z x and y so what that is is your camera based rotation so if i grab this white one right here and just kind of rotate it's going to rotate based on that camera view same thing with moving if i move in this direction that's going to go it's going to snap it to your z axis your x-axis and your y-axis however if i go over here that's going to move it along that camera plane it's very useful to kind of move this around in your scene based on your camera angle same thing with rotate now through here you're going to see we have scale so here's y scale so you can do non-uniform scale you can do z scale and x scale and if you go in here to the z scale and then you start scaling and hold down alt that'll scale in your x and z axis so that's really useful if you just want to make something bigger in this direction but you don't necessarily want to scale it this way of course this one right here in the middle is uniform scale and that's just a really easy way to kind of scale your scene to kind of scale your object uniformly so if i want a smaller cylinder here i can move a smaller cylinder up above this cylinder position it rotate it and there we go now i'm in gizmo mode now and again w e or r will go between those move scale and rotate when you're in the default gizmo doesn't really matter which one you choose however if you hit q that goes back into draw mode and now we're able to go through here and sculpt so you can go through here and you can sculpt on your object and if you want to move it just hit w and now you're in gizmo mode and now you can move it around hit q to go back into draw mode and now you can hold down shift to smooth you can scale change your brushes whatever you want to do mask and then when you're ready hit w to go back into gizmo mode and now you can move these things around of course your masked objects will stay behind so it's a really easy way if we go back to the character we were working on earlier i'm just going to select this tool here to pull out appendages switch back over to our startup material and if we want let's go ahead and turn off our floor as well we can hold down control we can mask out the bottom of this ctrl tab to invert this hit w and now we can just use our transpose or a gizmo to pull this down and of course you can see it's kind of off to the side here and we have x symmetry turned on so if i go over here and touch this little orange dot the gizmo will go over to this side so now we can kind of move in this direction if i go over here and touch this dot the gizmo is going to switch over to this side now let's talk a little bit more about this functionality up here we've touched a little bit on this gear icon where if we touch that we have a lot of interesting options in here however we're going to skip that for now we're going to go over here to this unmash mesh center mesh to axis and then reset mesh orientation so to demonstrate these two i'm not going to work on such a complex object we'll come back to this i just wanted to let you know that you could hold down control and drag and then go through here and add a mesh control drag ctrl drag again to dynamesh and then you can go back through here and we can like smooth this out and you can just start pulling appendages from your object here however let's go back into our tool palette we'll choose another cylinder 3d make polymesh3d turn on poly frame let me change my startup material over here to sketch shader 2. so we can see it a little bit better now let's hit w so the first thing you're going to see is this little lock icon if you hold down alt that'll switch to an unlock mode and essentially what that means is you can now move the pivot if you don't hold down alt and it goes back to locked that essentially is going to tell it is hey go ahead and rotate my object or scale my object or move my object however if i hold down alt and then do those operations i'm moving the pivot so i can move this pivot up to the top i can rotate the pivot you can't really scale the pivot that's more of a alt drag operation like scaling along two axes but you can certainly rotate and move a pivot while it's unlocked and again unlocking is very easily done just by holding down alt on your keyboard and that goes into move pivot mode so now with the pivot over there if i let go of alt now i will rotate from here i will move from this axis so essentially holding down alt allows you to change that pivot of the gizmo another really cool thing if you hold down alt and then just tap on your object it'll inherit that face direction and snap to that surface so again if i hold down alt and then just move the pivot over there and then alt tap on that face you'll see the y direction goes straight down this object and now we can just go through here and scale it in that direction or we can move it along this direction or rotate it from that point if we want to we can also hold down alt and go to this unmash mesh center now because i don't have anything masked on here it's just going to literally go and actually you don't even have to hold down alt you can just tap it and it'll always go to unmash mesh center so it'll go right to the middle of my scene however if i turn on the floor you're going to see here's our z axis here's our x-axis and of course y is straight up and down you're going to see our axis got a little bit off instead of it going straight up it's kind of turned to the side that's because when i held down alt i just moved that axis here so you can change this axis to whatever you want you can alt tap on here and it kind of snaps back to the rolled axis but let's say you alt tap on this face and you want to move it in that direction but then let's say you want to move it straight forward but you don't have this pointing straight forward anymore a real easy fix for that is a hold down alt and go over here to the house and then tap that that's going to go to world center so if i go down to the top here you're going to see that's going to go to the very center of my world so again if you hold down alt and you have your object selected and you go to the world axis and hold down alt that's going to go to 0 0 0 of your grid plane but you're going to see that axis is still off it's not going straight to the z or to the x how you get that is you hold down alt and then go reset orientation so if you tap that now it's right on that world 0 0 0 and then where z forward and x to the side the gizmo is exactly oriented to your world axis so now if you want to move it straight in your scene just move it this way or straight or to the left and the right or straight up and down that's an easy way to do that of course now the gizmo isn't in the middle of my object if i want to do that just go to unmash my center now it's in the middle of my object so if you ever find yourself with an object and your pivot is just kind of skewed off over to the side an easy way to get it back to your object is just go over here and hit this go to unmash mesh center and then hold down alt and say reset orientation and now it will reset it to your world axis of course if your object is like over here and rotated this way in your scene your gizmo will follow with it so if you go through here and now you scale this non-uniformly it's going to go right down the middle of that axis or you can move it along its own object axis like this however if you hold down alt and reset your orientation now it's set to the world axis which may be what you want if you want to move it straight forward or to the left or right in your scene but now we've kind of lost the orientation of our object you can easily get that back just hold down alt tap on these faces here and you'll see it's positioned just like that and then if i want to go to the middle of my object again just go to unmash mesh center now we've been changing our pivot so we've been holding down alt and going to the world center we've been holding down alt and resetting our orientation axis and that's allowing us to do the pivot so if we go and hold down alt and then change our pivot back to here and then go to unmash mesh center you're going to see we're right down this object axis and the pivot is right in the middle of our object now if we choose these two options go to the world axis and then reset my orientation without holding down alt that's going to move my object so if i just tap this now it's going to take the pivot where it is and just put that right in the middle of your world 0 0 0. now you're going to see this the floor dropped that's because the default in zbrush is to have your draw menu here the elevation is going to be set to negative 1 which means always set the floor to the lowest sub tool in my scene in this case if i set this elevation to 0 you're going to see it'll set it to that world 0 0 0 axis so generally speaking i'll go ahead and leave this at negative 1 because it's nice to have for dynamics having a floor plan to drape things across that are the lowest point in your scene or if you go up here to bpr and render it'll have a nice shadow catcher available for you at that level so that's why the default behavior acts like that but if you don't like that just go here to draw set that elevation to zero or really whatever you'd like and it'll do that for you but we'll set this back to negative one so we had our object out in space and it was rotated and habits had its pivot set and then we went over here and we touched the house without holding down alt and that just moved this entire mesh to your world zero zero zero axis now there's another thing that will kind of do that and that is under your deformation unify the difference between go to my world axis and unify is unify will put your object at the world axis however it's also going to scale it to fit within a one unit scale of z brush so if i go over here to my floor plane and i turn on x y and z you're going to see we have all three axes and then if we go back here to draw grid size choose one you're going to see this is a one unit scale so if i had it scaled up pretty big and i say and it was off over to the side and rotated however we wanted we say go to my world center it'll snap it to the world center but it's not going to scale it if i do that with unify it'll snap it to the world scale or snap it to the world center and it will scale it to fit within that one unit size bounding box this can be very handy while you're working in zbrush but if you ever want to snap your object to the world center let's go ahead and hit go to unmatch my center here that's an easy way to do that just go through here have your object wherever it is in space and then just snap it to the middle of your world now again we usually you know reset our pivots let's go ahead and turn our floor off we can hold down alt and reset this to world center but if we undo that just hit ctrl z and now without holding down alt and touch that now it's going to snap this to the world center axis if we turn our floor back on you're going to see it's going to be right on that floor and it oriented it for us so if you ever have an object that's like a little skewed and out here to the side and even if the pivot is a little bit off remember you can always hold down alt tap a face to go right down that axis go to unmash mesh center and then you can just hit this reset without holding down alt and that will reset this to the world axis and now when i hold down shift you're going to see it straightened it out for me and if you wanted the center of your world that's when you can touch the house and go right back to that center of that world axis now we talked about how when we let's go and turn off our floor here when we scale non-uniformly and hold down alt it'll go through and scale on those other two axes so instead of scaling down the axis or you can like scale down the axis first then if you want to make this coin bigger hold down alt as you're scaling and that'll go ahead and scale it along that axis there along in this case your y and x axis however you may notice if you hold down control and drag that will run a clip operation so if you remember if you hold down ctrl shift and grab clip curve and you say ctrl shift and drag and just snap that to that side you can also hold down control and drag and that will go ahead and clip from these directions too so you just pull from this side pull from this side pull from this side or pull from this side you can very quickly clip your object as well as if you hold down alt and rotate your pivot now you can clip in this direction so you can clip these points here to flat directions as well and again if you want to go into sculpting mode or back to draw mode just hit q on your canvas and now you're out of gizmo mode however if we go back into move mode just hit w and here's your uniform scale if you hold down control on uniform scale that'll actually perform an inflate operation so the same thing is going in here to deformation and then choosing inflate it will kind of push along those surface normals holding down control will do an inflate operation or you can do uniform scale if you don't hold down control let's check this undo slider all the way back to where we just had our cylinder if we go back here to the subtool menu you'll see we're back to just one cylinder and again we can uniformly scale or hold down control and say inflate along those surfaces now there's some other basic gizmo functionality which is pretty cool you can and we'll talk a little bit more about subtools we've touched a little bit on this where if i go down here and i duplicate now i have a duplicate of this and if i use the move brush i can move this over and now i have an extra cylinder in my scene if i alt tap another object in my scene and i could be in draw mode if i hit q and i'm in draw mode i can just again alt tap this i can start sculpting on this one i'll tap this one start sculpting on this one and it's basically selecting these sub tools so instead of having to go through here and select these in my scene or in my subtool stack i can literally just go through here and hold down alt and select these another thing you do is you get w and that'll bring your gizmo back and again if your gizmo is off to the side and kind of weird just go through here and in fact if it's off your screen entirely remember you can always just alt tap your object and that'll bring your gizmo back there's also underneath your masking menu you're going to see there's a go to unmash mesh center button so you can assign a hotkey to that functionality and then if you just your gizmos off the screen you can hit this button or again assign a hotkey and that will go ahead and snap that there of course that's also that button functionality so if you want your gizmos off the screen and you hold down alt and tap on your object and then go to unmash my center that's an alternative to that another thing you can do is you can hold down control and drag and you can actually drag off a copy and you're going to see when i do that the original object is already masked if we go over here underneath brush auto masking you're going to see we're getting into a little bit of auto masking with mesh insert this isn't a mesh insert but it'll do something very similar when we get into insert mesh brushes but now what we can do is we can hold down control we can drag off a copy and in fact if we control drag and unmask everything we can control drag here and you're going to see it's going to make all three of these a new object now you're going to see it's not going to do anything to this one and that's because this is a separate sub tool we have this one here which has these masks and these unmasked and then this right here is another sub tool so now with that one selected i can hold down ctrl and drag and what i'm going to do this time is i'm going to control drag this up and instead and before i let go of my tablet i'm going to let go of control and if i keep dragging it'll just keep making copies equally spaced from our original so we control drag again and then ctrl drag and then let go of control while still dragging you're going to see you can make more copies now if i ctrl drag and let's say i want to make a copy of just this corner one well i can hold down ctrl mask over this one ctrl tab in my document and then if i control drag out i can make a copy of this one a little bit faster way to do that is if you hold down control and drag to unmask and then hold down control alt and drag that will go ahead and unmask this and mask everything else and then from here of course you can hold down control and drag this out or if you just want to move it and it may be a little abstract having your pivot way off remember just go to unmash mesh center i'll go to the middle of your object and now you're free to move this around if you want to have a little bit of a faster easier way to do that instead of going through here and making like a mask selection let's control drag declare a mask let's go down here to polygroups and hit this auto groups button anything that's not vertex welded will get its own polygroup so you're going to see they're all different colors here so now what i can do is i can hold down control and tap any one of these and that will go ahead and select or unmask that individual object so very quickly i can go through here control tap one and now i can either move it around hold down shift to rotate it i can hold down control and drag out a copy and when i do that you're going to see these are going to be all the same polygroup here so what i can do is ctrl drag again and the reason i'm doing that is if i have all of these masked and i go down here and i hit ctrl w which is group mask clear mask that's going to group all of these as the same object so what i choose to do instead is ctrl drag out here and then go over here and say auto groups however if it's useful for you if you're like i want all of these middle ones here let's hold down ctrl shift we select clip so if you remember you tap control wants to go into visibility selection you can use our spacebar to move this around you can isolate all of these objects here we can hit ctrl w i'll go ahead and group all these ones ctrl shift tap to bring everything else back and if you want to make that a little bit easier just hold down ctrl shift switch to select rectangle so now we can go through here and i can grab say this one ctrl shift drag and grab these two oops ctrl shift drag and then ctrl shift alt drag so now i can very individually go through here and select precisely the ones i want to select ctrl shift drag to invert that selection ctrl w or while these are visible i can go in here to auto groups ctrl shift drag these maintain the same polygroups here so i can hit ctrl w to make these all one polygroup or i can hold down control shift alt i can hit ctrl w to make them all one polygroup ctrl shift alt to remove the visibility hit ctrl w ctrl shift alt ctrl w so every time i did that i made a new polygroup with what was visible on my screen and now if i hit ctrl shift tap i bring everything back and now these have their own polygroups so now if i hold down control and tap it's going to unmask everything with the same polygroup which is by design that's how i group them of course i can control drag and then go back down here to group or auto groups and now they all have their own polygroups here and again i can hit hold down control and tap and then select one of these individually so if you want to just move one individually and again we can hold down alt reset our axis orientation so i can move this one straight up or i can hold down control and drag to unmask everything now if i want to unmask multiple if i control tap this one and i'm like well i want to have these on mask too this is where it's a little bit easier probably go through here and hold down ctrl alt and just unmask these and now i can move scale and rotate those three objects and again if we go up here you're going to see we have two subtools we have this sub tool here if we go into solo mode you're not going to see those anymore and if we choose this one you're going to see these but not see these ones anymore even though they both have eyeballs on there you can use solo to just have whatever one you have selected visible to you so let's go ahead and control drag without selected to unmask and if we turn off polyframe you're going to see our unselected subtool is actually a little bit darker and we choose this one this one's lighter now and this one's a little bit darker this is an easy way to determine which sub tool you have selected while you're working on it just makes it a little bit more obvious in fact if you go in here to preferences edit there's an inactive subtool dimming so you can actually change this to be very dim or pretty bright depending on what you choose but the defaults are pretty good now we've already talked about poly paint and if we go over here and we have the paint brushes if we hold down shift and touch a paint brush that's going to turn on the poly paint for all of them and now you're going to see they're both white even though if we alt select this one or we go through here and select these subtools it's now showing us the vertex color which in this case is pure white and now it's a little more difficult to tell which subtool i have selected of course if you're poly painting and you want to choose like a red color color fill object and then alt tap this one and fill this with a light blue color fill object again alt tapping here you won't really see which one you have selected but you are selecting them and it's because you have poly paint turned on as to why it's difficult to tell it won't do object dimming however if you hold down shift and turn off poly paint now you can see which object you have selected and of course since we turned off our poly paint it's inheriting whatever color we have selected so we'll just choose white again and we'll change our material to start up material or in your case matcap gray and then you can very easily tell which sub tool is being selected now speaking of masking and gizmo move we did this uh just a sneak preview let's go ahead and switch over here to skin shader four so you can see it's a little bit better when we had that one object where we had part of it masked and again if you want to just unmask part of something so right now i have to control tab to invert that mask but again if you control drag to unmask and then ctrl alt drag it'll unmask just this portion here and we hit w again my gizmo is not anywhere on the screen so i don't know where it is i'm just going to alt tap and now you're going to see if i go to unmash mesh center because this is our unmashed portion and i go to unmash my center it's going to snap to the middle of the unmask portion as opposed to the middle of the object or in this case if we ctrl drag and say go to unmash mesh center it's going to go to the middle of the bounding box of all of these subtools because they're all part of one sub tool so i hold down if i hit w and i'm in gizmo mode and i control tap any of these and then go to unmash mesh center it's going to go to the middle of the unmasked portion and if i continue to make this mask smaller if i hold down control and mask out the bottom portion of this and then go to unmash mesh center it's going to hop up here because this is the only unmask portion and if i want i can go ahead and hold down alt and reset this pivot now like we did before if i hold down control and drag it's going to add a new edge loop and i can control drag again and control drag again and in fact just like when you're dragging out duplicates if i hold down control drag up a certain distance and then let go of control while i still drag it's going to keep adding edge loops through our object here so hold down control alt and unmask this side of the object and hold down control and drag and then let go you're going to see we can very quickly start adding edge loops or edge rings to our object

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 6,809

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush gizmo, zbrush gizmo buttons, zbrush reset, zbrush pivot, zbrush move pivot, zbrush gizmo pivot, zbrush gizmo snap, zbrush gizmo align, zbrush go to center, zbrush center pivot, zbrush snap to center, zbrush move to center, zbrush gizmo clip

Id: KWKFsbFGfSI

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021