Setting up a Wacom masking radial menu for ZBrush

[Music] hey what's up guys paul munoz here and welcome back to this mini series of masking in xerox so in this second video i'm going to cover a more like a productivity tip something that you can use to speed up the workflow of masking and editing your mask using a wacom pen or a wacom tablet as long as you have the express keys to bring in the radial menu so it's more of a productivity tip but it really helps once you get used to using these menus in your workflow to speed up again the process so let's go ahead and jump straight into it alright so here we are in zebros i'm using the default ui this is pretty much where we left off in the previous video and i'm using you know the same character now before we jump into the wacom settings and and set up the the shortcuts which is essentially what this tip is all about we need to have some custom shortcuts in in our xeros ui so that we can call specific processes from the wacom tablet so i'm going to go ahead and scroll down to the masking palette right and if i hover over any of these buttons here you'll see that i have already assigned some custom shortcuts so if i hover over the blur mask it is ctrl plus minus so ctrl n minus sharpen mask is ctrl and plus shrink mask is just the minus button in my number pad grow mask is just the plus button so these are the buttons that i want to include in my radial menu but there are a few other things that you can include like mask by cavity or you know as long as there is a button you can assign a shortcut and that be that'll be fine so i'm going to go ahead and show you how to assign a custom hotkey or shortcode to any of the buttons in here i also have a shortcut for view mask which is ctrl h so i can just paint a mask and hold ctrl and h to hide it right but other things like clear or invert the mask that's something that i can do from the canvas so in other words like i showed you in the first video i can mask something like this hold ctrl and click once in the canvas and invert it or ctrl click and drag to remove it so i don't really need to create a you know a custom shortcut for this so let's go ahead and assign a hotkey to something like the mask by cavity so i'm going to hold shift to expand this one and i'm going to assign a hotkey to this button here that says mask by cavity so the way that you do that is pretty simple and we're just going to hold the control and the alt key at the same time so again ctrl alt at the same time and i'm going to click on the button so as soon as i do that at the top of the interface it says press any key combination to assign a hotkey or press escape or mouse button to cancel or press delete to remove any previously assigned a custom assignment so again just ctrl alt click once on the button and the next immediate action is to assign a hotkey so i'm going to use something like control and three and that's it so i just press ctrl and the number three in my number pad so if i hover now over the mass by cavity it is assigned to control three that's it that's as easy as it gets and now i can basically hold ctrl i can be sculpting and i can hold ctrl and three and see where it's going to automatically mask base on the cavities right which is pretty pretty handy i clear that up and let's move this one towards the left hand side and i'm going to bring in the tablet properties or the wacom tablet so i'm pretty sure that you can do similar things with all the manufacturers of tablets i'm just going to concentrate on the wacom settings just because it's what i use and what i would recommend but i'm pretty sure you can do the same thing with other tablets so these are the wacom properties and i have basically a device a tool and an application so the device is the cintiq the current synthetic that i have the tool is in this case a pro pen 3d and the main difference between this pro pen 3d and pro pen is that the one that i'm currently using has an extra button which is a button used to orbit around 3d application but there's no no magic or real difference between them it's just that it has an additional button here that you can see right so i have three buttons that's all all right so and obviously we're going to select the application that i have open 0 i also have zero score open but oh zero score mini open but i'm going to keep it to zero and that's it you just have to select the pro pen or any pen that you are using with your cintiq if you have an interest or any other tablet you selected from here select the application so let's go ahead and click on this drop down to select which action i want to trigger when i press this button at the top of my pen so i'm going to click on that and go to on-screen controllers and i'm going to click on let's go for a radio menu we can change that later i just want to show you that i want to select an on-screen on on-screen controller right and now we can go back to the ek remote again if you don't have a cintiq this should be just part of the express keys uh part of the intuos but in my case it is a separate device so i'm gonna click on that and here's where you can go and select what the touch ring does what the express keys of the control does or the on-screen controller so this is this one is the important one right so i just went to the tab that says on-screen controllers and all we have to do is select the one that we want and for the purpose of this tutorial i'm going to create a new one so i'm going to click on this plus button and i'm going to call it masking tools zbrush or zb right and then you can choose what type of visuals you're gonna get so i prefer the radial menu i think it's nicer but you can also have like buttons like this this type of layouts and you can change the size of the button i'm gonna go for a not something that big but something like this and i'm gonna leave the display out cursor enable so that means that when i press the button in my pen whatever my cursor is this radio menu is gonna appear so i think that works a lot better for this type of workflow i'm gonna click okay and that's it now we have eight different sections or pi menus within that um that radio menu that we can assign right so if you don't want all of them you can remove them i'll show you how but i'm just gonna concentrate on assigning the the main ones right so i'm gonna go to the one at the top you can see that with the little icon that this one is the one at the top when i click on this drop down and this first option that says keystroke that's exactly what we want so i'm gonna go ahead and click on keystroke and all i have to do is clear and press the plus sign in my number pad and you can give it a name so the plus is to uh i already forgot so let's go back to zero and double check what i assign already so yeah the plus is to grow mask and let's go back in here so let's call this one grow i'm not going to type grow mask because this is a menu just for masking so i know that grow it relates to mask i'm going to click ok and let's go ahead and do the same thing for let's say the bottom one so i like to have visual cues as to what i assign so if i go up that grows the mask if i go down like this one it will shrink the mask so let's go to keystroke key stroke keystroke and let's do the same thing let's clear let's press the minus button or the minus in my keyboard my keypad and i'm going to call this one shrink capitals click ok and that's it i'm going to go ahead and apply the same concept for blurring the mask and sharpening so i'm going to blur the mask with the the left one so click on that key stroke and that's going to be plus minus or ctrl plus minus and that's going to be blur okay and let's do one more for sharpening so sharpening is going to be on the right hand side clear and that is with ctrl plus and let's go ahead and name name it shrink oh sorry sharpen click ok so now we have grow sharpen shrink and blur and just to you know show you the one that we assigned to the mask by cavity let's add it to this one right here so i'm going to click on the same thing same deal and it is control three the one that we decided control three and this one is called cavity and that's it as you can see it is very easy to assign anything that you want for the ek remote or express keys on screen controls in the wacom the welcome tablet this might look slightly different depending on your drivers and depending on your tablet but for the most part it is the same thing you just need to find where is the on-screen controls to assign it all right so just before i finish here i'm going to go ahead and remove these ones i don't want to see any of that so wacom properties i'm just going to disable this one this one as well disable disable and yeah just leave these five right so these are these keys are assigned to that radial menu which is called the masking tools so now that we have assigned this one we can go back to let's say the cintiq to select our propane right and before remember i just had a radial menu now if i click on this drop-down go to the on-screen controls now we should have that menu that we created before called the masking tools zebras i'm going to click on that and now in when i use zebras because that's the the selected application whenever i use zebras and i have my pro pen and i press this this button at the top it's gonna bring in that radial menu so let's go ahead and close that and let's use that or see how this is working in action so i don't have to go to my masking palette anymore i can keep you know if anything i can just close this up and then press the tab key as well so that it can work a little bit cleaner in here and but before i do that let's go ahead and oh let's just leave the the clay brush all right so i'm going to show you exactly what the menu looks like so i'm going to go ahead and press the that button in my pen and that's a little bit too big for for my day so let's go back to the properties and let's go to the eq remote or ek remote go to the on screen and let's select that radial menu and let's go ahead and click on this icon here to edit it so let's edit that make it a bit smaller um something like that that should be the default one anyway click ok and that's it so let's do it again i'm going to press that button from my pen and as you can see whenever i press that that radial menu appears and that is nothing to do with zebras again that's just from my tablet for the wacom tablet but it is a very quick and easy way to work but you know you don't have to resource to the keyboard to use the shortcuts or the palettes you can be working like this and you know you can create a masking then press the button and you can blur that mask right so that again you can blur that mask or you can sharpen it or you can shrink that mask and grow it or clear that mask and just click on cavity and that way you can mask out the cavity and let's say if you want to blur that cavity you can also bring that in and blur that mask you can invert it and now we can just bring in the inflate let's also hide the mask just so that you can see what i'm doing the deformation palette and i can just target those crevices and deflating them or inflating them to create weird details like that so obviously this is not relevant in this case doesn't really work that well but it's just to show you that i could be working on something like this and accessing this this panel now one really cool thing that you can do as well is let's say that you want to work on you know refining this area so i'm going to mask this portion of the head right and let's go ahead and bring in this and i want to blur it so that it is not as strong when i use something like the clay brush so i'm going to click on blur and as soon as i do that obviously the radial menu disappears and so i can just go back and start sculpting but if i go back i can also blur it a few more times so if i bring in the menu again with this radial menu you also have this icon to pin that to the to the screen so i can just pin that right and i can move this around whatever i want to and i can start working let's say in in a specific area that i know i'm going to use all of these controllers quite often i can just go ahead and blur that a few times so i can just keep blurring it or i can sharpen that mask just by clicking a few times i can shrink it sharpen shrink it and maybe blur it a little bit and now i can toggle this off so that next time that i click away it's going to disappear let's remove it and invert the mask and now i can start adding some volume but there is a mask restricting where i can add that volume and it's very very very soft right let's clear that mask and then a bit of smoothing and there we go but that's pretty much it is more about productivity than anything else it's just about how to set this up all right so hopefully you have found this productivity tip useful again this is something that you can utilize across multiple software not just zebras this is more of a pen for the the wacom tablet tip and productivity tip but yeah it is very very useful so in the next video of this series i'm going to cover how to create your own custom mask and you don't want to miss that one it's really really cool so i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Pablo Muñoz Gómez

Views: 1,563

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Id: mK-DC2je8SU

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021