Saving in Zbrush - Zproject, Ztool, Zdocument Explained

so I was browsing Reddit and it came across a post by this user he was having some issues with saving in zebra she saved his work and he went back to open it later and he had lost a bunch of work he was asking for suggestions and this resonated with me because I think we've all been there where you've saved something in neither zbrush or Maya or any program and you come back and your work is gone or your files corrupted I remember way way back in the day we would like mess around with mayafiles.ma files and like try to change things in them to like recover them and stuff and it was usually futile but once in a while you had some success but beyond that it got me thinking about how convoluted saving and zbrush might be for somebody who's never really used zbrush before so this video is very much targeted towards beginners who are getting started and just kind of want to know a little bit more about how zbrush works and how they can protect their work and make sure that they're saving their files correctly so I just want to show you all the different kind of quirks and features about saving in zbrush so let's go ahead and get started the first thing you need to know is that there's actually three ways to save zbrush you can save your document you can save your tool or you can save your project one is drastically different and the other two have their use cases based on what you're trying to accomplish or how you want to work so why don't we go ahead first and save each one of these file types and then we'll look at each one individually so first I'm going to save a document I'm going to go up to document and I'm going to save I'm gonna make a new folder and I'm just going to call this necro doc this is my Necromancer that I'm working on so we're just going to save the document version of it next I'm going to save a tool so up in the top right we're going to go to save as in the tool menu and I'm just going to go ahead and save we'll call this necro tool and lastly I'm going to save my project you can hit Ctrl s or you can go up to file save and just save that off and that's going to be the project so why don't we go ahead and open each one of these now and look at the differences between them first we're going to open the document and at first glance it pretty much looks like our project my character is there and has all its pieces and looks normal but you'll immediately notice that if you go to rotate or move the model it's not going to move at all and that's because in what you'll quickly notice is that this is what's called 2.5 D so we've actually given up our model and now we're just in this 2.5 d space so there is no 3D information now zbrush has both a 3D section you know what you sculpt and create models on and it has a 2.5 d section and the 2.5 d section uses what's called pixels pixels pixels I've never actually had to say that word out loud pixels what a pixel is is a pixel with extra information it has depth orientation and material information and so it's basically just a pixel with a few extra channels and what this is 4 is to create kind of more complex illustrations within zbrush now this isn't really a feature or part of zbrush that's really used in fact for this video I tried to find some examples of 2.5 D zbrush illustrations and I really couldn't find any I do remember in the past uh there was a guy named Andre Jones who used to kind of mess around with this stuff and it was pretty Adept at it it doesn't seem like it's something that people really use anymore right we just use zbrush for sculpting and creating amazing 3D figures but it's important for you to understand what this is and so when you're saving your document you're losing all of your 3D information and you're just keeping the 2.5 D information next let's open that tool so to open the tool we have to go back up to the top right panel I'm going to hit load tool we're going to bring it in and we're going to drag it and immediately you're going to see that this is basically our 3D model there's no bells and whistles here it's pretty straightforward now what we need to pay attention to to understand the difference between these Z Tool and the Z project is in the tool panel now you'll notice when I loaded this it loaded it as just a new tool in the bottom of that panel but it has all those goofy brushes still that I was playing with when we had the document and that's because we've just opened a single new tool and that's the thing with zbrush you can have multiple tools or sub tools open at a time so you can jump between them and so we just saved that and this has benefits one of the benefits is that it's a smaller file size and saving the whole project and stuff like that but before we get into those let's go ahead and open the project so we can actually see what changes so now when I open the project you can immediately see a bunch of things changed it stores all of our information about our project in that file you can see even my background color was stored so it changed to what I had previously and you can also see up in that tool menu all those brushes that we were playing with are gone and now it's just the tools that I had in my project so the project saves a lot of information about what you're working on so you can kind of Imagine which one you might want to use for what so if you're just doing like a simple sculpt or something without a complex project like just a speed sculpt maybe just save the tool off because it's a smaller file size and you don't need a bunch of information and stuff kind of just keep it neat and orderly and then when you're working on more complex characters or you might have multiple tools and you have a lot of things you want to keep and you're fiddling with it's important to save the whole project now if we look at the file sizes you can see the file sizes are dramatically different in size even with this specific project being pretty light you can see we basically just have that one tool and we just have like Primitives like it's not like I have a bunch of duplicate characters or anything in this project but the file size is almost like 60 or 70 gigs bigger so that's something to keep in mind another important thing to note about projects is you can actually save your history in projects and now doing so will greatly balloon your project size so you have to watch out for that in order to save your history you need to go up to preferences go down to undo history and make sure enable saving is on now there is a couple options in here you can turn on compression and you can turn on optimize and these will help kind of control troll that a little bit you'll notice optimizes actually for when you're working in the project so it'll try to optimize the active memory that the undo history is taking up if you have a lot of history this can actually slow down your workflow so you might want to disable that sometimes and then you'll see compression is for when it's actually being saved it's going to try to compress that history to minimize the file size now this isn't the only thing you have to enable you actually also have to go up to file and turn on the undo history button up in file as well so there's two places that you need to make sure that are enabled for your project to store undo history so now you can see that we've added some history to these pants if we go ahead and reopen the project that history is now stored in this project file and now like I mentioned before this does balloon the project size so if you are at states where you're like okay I don't really need the history anymore it might be a good idea to purge that unless you're okay with giant file sizes but it always kind of makes me nervous when they start getting really really big or just because I'm always fighting for disk space but that's up to you lastly I just wanted to mention a bit about file recovery if zbrush crashes on you and you're looking to recover your work you can hit comma on your keyboard or go up to the light box button in the left hand side and go to quick save and you'll see that you should have quick saved versions of your files there you can see that I have way way way too many and if we navigate to the path that it says down here you can see the windows location of all your quick save files you can see that I have about like 100 gigs worth of quick save files probably too many I need to clear that out and in order to do that you can go up to preferences go down to quick save and you've got all your settings for the quick saves down there how many you want to keep you can purge them from there and a couple other settings as well like optimizing the file sizes you can see even with optimize on the file sizes of these are enormous so it's probably better to keep it on so if you're a beginner I hope that was helpful or you know if you were just somebody who never really thought about it that much the Z Tool and the Z project both have their use cases based on what you're doing and how big you want your file size to be well the document is pretty much useless unless you're kind of into exploring the 2.5 D stuff but uh yeah that's pretty much dead and gone at this point so thank you so much for watching if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing if you have questions or comments go ahead and leave a comment in the comment section below and don't stop creating I'll see you next time take care foreign

Channel: hart

Views: 7,419

Keywords: art, game art, gaming, games, 3d, 3d art, digital art, stylized, stylized characters, character art, video game art, cg, computer graphics, cg art, art education, art tutorials, game art tutorials, sculpting, modeling, 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, digital sculpting, texturing, retopology, zbrush, substance, painter, zbrushtutorials, hand, hands, sculpting hands, hands zbrush

Id: bmOvsVtnFfc

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2022