The Ultimate ZBrush Custom UI for Productivity

hey guys any important front-flip normals here in this video we're gonna take a look at how you can customize the interface and the hotkeys in ZBrush to really speed up your work for that make sure to subscribe and hit the little notification bell so in this interest you can see is clearly quite different from default one and this is something we have spent quite some time getting up to this level where essentially everything we ever need exists here without going through menus at least the stuff we use the like tin 90% on time exists to write your interface if you don't want to go through and customize this interface you can download it from the link in the description this also contains a hot key list so you can very easily go to preferences config and hit load UI and you can go to hotkeys and you can hit load hotkeys as well so this is this is what we prefer to work with or something like this the we do this is under preferences and config and enable customize so here you can click it and I see the interface changes a little bit we have kind of in a meta way put it in a naval customers down in interface so we can more easily do this so what you can do now is if you find a feature you want maybe want delete lower you can control all drag if enable custom is enabled ctrl alt drag and you can drag this inter interface where you want to be and now you can control all drag it into the main UI here or into into the 3d area and to delete it so it's very easy to actually customize the UI once you're done customizing it you have to hit save UI and store config and that's going to make sure that you can load this in in the future so let's just cover briefly what this interface looks like first up here we have set sub tool master because this is something we use a lot and there's no point going under all the way undersea plugin for that then we removed some of the stuff over here which we didn't really need like alternate and gradient and then we also set set up thumbnail and silhouette view so you can very easy to go between this as well double you can't really see any effects here but if you have single sided polygons so you can easily see this as well you can change the lighting as well this is really useful though this only works if you using addy fault material in north america then we have the selection tools here so you can quickly go between them like so so now whatever you're selecting is just very quickly quick to go between these two obviously enable customize because we keep customizing the I keep customizing the interface a lot so instead of having to go up all the time I can quickly just do it here then we have dynamesh and dynamesh dynamesh resolution cuo measure as well this is something more than I talked before if you should have the legacy feature or the current CEO measure Iker I still have the the current CEO measure but the legacy one might give you better results for characters then we have the target folder count for force the CEO master as well one feature which is really annoying and see which is symmetry and we're going to talk a bit more about that under a hotkey section of this but essentially this allows us to see if symmetry is enabled in a really quick and easy way because it's a big button and a light supper then we have a delete hidden which deletes everything which is not currently visible Auto groups which creates another poly groups for different sub tools so if you have if you have two subtours like this and hit Auto Group now we are going to get different sub tools based on them yeah all of this is really just intended to speed up the the workflows that you do day to day now this might be different I was working on a hard surface UI as well which is quite a lot more extensive just because of all the different things you can do with hard surface in ZBrush this UI here I would recommend it more for character artists or people that just saw a solely do sculpting in ZBrush yeah I for for for hard surface you have so many more specific features which you would never really use for for this but this is like a good generic one have stole morph target which does exactly that then we have fixed mesh this is one these magical buttons which if you for instance scan data it will just fix your mesh sometimes you can't bring your model into Maya for instance click fix mesh and the mesh has through magic been fixed we have mirror which will let flip the object and then we have mirror and weld the reason these two are together is because it will always flip it will always mirror and weld from the screen left to screen right so if you want to go from screen right to screen left first students have to flip your object then we have subdivision sliders as well this is this is the fastest way of actually going between the subdivisions if you have a lot of subdivisions and is very heavy so in in this case here we have 11 million Polly's and we have 6 salvation so instead of going hitting shifty to go up and down levels like this we can just slide here and now you go to highest levels yeah and with either even higher poly counts and bigger scenes sometimes it can actually slow the system down quite a lot by hitting shift D and D so being able to go directly to the subdivision level that you want it's just a lot faster those holes will close the holes and group split will split your object into different sub tools say for instance if we have two subfields like or two polygraphs of this it will split them into separate into separate sub tools quick little tip as well just what I just did here is if you had ctrl W it will mask I will give you a poly group to whatever is currently masked which is really useful it ctrl W to just give a different polygroups to your model as well delete more target and those holes right we will talk about that delete lower this will delete the lower subdivisions and delete higher will delete the higher subdivisions so we go all the way to the bottom now or maybe we want to preserve level 3 now we can hit delete lower and you can delete higher and now we have this is our real subdivision level now I use this a lot when it comes to concept again just bashing our ideas can do that then we have export and with export comes to group button if you are working in a C brush to my workflow you can't have any any groups and a we'll see if you have polar groups like this see if you actually give it from color now and you have a new group is enabled now this means that your model is gonna completely explode when you take this into Maya now there is a fix for this in Maya with the obj you can import it as a whole object but most of the time we tend to forget so having the option to turn off groups it's just a lot faster in ZBrush then we have a pen this well we can now append a sub tool like this so we can just have another sphere and we can start sculpting on this right away there is also the delete button as well mark no we're talking about it have it or not but there is a weird bug if you put the delete button in the interface sometimes it deletes itself yeah it's actual button I've had I've had the delete button in my UI for years but I've stopped using it because sometimes there she goes even further oh yeah and yeah using that delete button deletes other parts of the UI you restart seabirds and everything is fine again but I find it to be really under live yeah so I'm pushing the delete button in the UI at your own peril so that's essentially how I customize my interface in ZBrush you can also delete a bunch of things over here as well like you really don't need the vast majority of this I keep here because sometimes I screw up by accident and I want hit actual and then I go in here or sometimes I want to zoom in like this but it's very rare you could really delete the vast majority of everything here like you don't need navigation like you these kind of things you you really don't need because it's it's all right here I just didn't want to go too crazy what particular interface which we were distributing to other people for me everything on the right hand side there I've I've nuked that that's just gone what I've done instead is I've taken everything on the left hand side and I should put it on the right hand side because I'm right-handed and I don't want to have to go across the screen if you feel like that works for you you should try experimenting with that as well now let's talk about the hotkeys were using as well we keep in quite light on hotkeys but hotkeys I've personally set up are for brushes and some of the most used features so I'm using for brushes and a solo button I'm using one two six not on a numpad but right above the keyboard and this is speed seven worked for a lot so when if if I want to solo I hit the one key if I want to have the standard brush I hit a two key and so on but let's just quickly talk about how you can set up your own your own hotkeys so if you want to hotkey for instance the standard brush you can go here and I can control alt and click on it and now you can see that it's gonna say tell you that hey you can now press any combination of keys to set this to hotkey so now you can set this to for instance number or zero and now it's going to allow you to set this up I'm not going to set this up because oh I've already done it but now you can set up hotkeys like this so ctrl alt click on whatever interface item you want to hotkey and that keeps it very easy so for me let's just go through them and you can also find this in the description one is solo instead of having can go down here keeps it very easy to is standard three is claim build up for is move five is damn standard and sixes trim dynamic this allows them to go very quickly go between the different brushes without having to go into maybe as TBM V whatever it might be annals makes or tutorials a lot cleaner as well because you don't see this menu here all the time then an issue with C rush this is not it's a tricky one it's more like a UX issue is ZBrush is that symmetry is incredibly easy to accidentally disable so by default it's set to the X key which means that if you're sculpting now I say you just we just have some simulations here and now we're just doing our standard sculpting and now you hit the Alt key and Alt key is very close to the X key which now means that you have now disabled symmetry and if you're working over here you can't necessarily see if symmetry is on or off that's what we added this toggle here just make it easier but it's very easy for you to sculpt like this hold down the Alt key and then you hit the X key and now symmetry is just disabled and it's a real pain to get this back so what I've done is I have remapped enable symmetry to shift X can you still do this by going transform and actuate symmetry and this shift X here instead because now it's not going to I'm not accidentally going to enable or disable symmetry so whatever set to DX given well I've set that to blur mask because this is something I do quite a lot as well but it doesn't really spray anything up if I contently blur the mask while sculpting you know like now I'm hitting the X key but there's nothing to blur so it's not a problem so I highly recommend that you switch symmetry to shift X only problem with that is by default that's such an expose so if you go to another computer now and you start to sculpt you're gonna explode what did you do yeah I I screwed up no but honestly the changing whatever you change it to change the symmetry activate symmetry to something else than X it might seem like well why would you ever hit the X key if you're holding down the Alt key well you do we've been using this for like over 10 years and just as it's a problem it's not just a problem for us it's a problem for everyone and then the last thing I second last a hotkey is I say I set the control s to tool and save ass the reason is because I don't use projects I use exclusively tools which is a whole different debate and the very longest one I said this this is a bit of a weird one but under document and export let's set the control queue so this means now that I can hit ctrl Q and I can set this to JPEG and then we can export out a quick Oh an image very quickly this is really useful whenever you're presenting your work ctrl Q save your work ctrl Q another angle and so on so yeah it's this setup here saves me so much time both when it comes in interface and when it comes to the hotkeys as well this is something I've been working on for many years and this is this is my day-to-day setup yeah you don't really know what you need to use until you've started using the tool for a while so you know it'll definitely change for you as well once you started using this you might find a lot of this to be redundant if you do remove it and then replace it with you know whatever yields you have in there I think one other thing we should mention just as a bonus item it is under document you can actually change both the size of your document but also the color of your document sometimes you don't want to look at that's called the beautiful ZBrush gradient alright so changing the color in here like the range for example it's at the zero at the moment I think by default the range is set to 0.25 or something like that changing the range to zero or color picking any item from the interface it allows you to set your own background color yeah this is very handy as well we also set our this the document size to to be the exact size of our of what's currently here if we set this to something tiny if you do something like something stupid small like this and we here the new document now we're going to have the tiniest document in the world so now you can see the problem on this is we're actually way outside here and this might be what you have by default so a fix for this is to set this to W size new document that's gonna automatically scale it so now you we currently have a document which is nice and big so yeah I guess it was like a last bonus tip last bonus tip for either so yeah I make sure you you you download this interface if you don't want to set this up yourself you can check that from the link in the description with both the interface and the hotkeys and we'd love to hear how you are customizing your own version of ZBrush and we could we can modify our own based on your suggestions because we're always open to learning more things in ZBrush and please send us screenshots on Twitter of all your horrible colored ZBrush interfaces because we'd love that that's a monstrosity to look at sometimes I love watching what people do with the colors in ZBrush so yeah things always for watching make sure to subscribe like and click it a little Cajun Belle and leave a little comment about what you thought about the video as well if you're looking for training or high quality assets make sure to stop by the flip normals marketplace and if you're interested in supporting us by buying our merchandise you can check that out in the description below

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 40,343

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, foundry, pixologic, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cube brush, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru, cgi, blender 2.8, blender 3d, b3d, Blender tutorial, blender tutorials, learning blender

Id: wIMVvnOPDig

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020