Using the Transpose Smart Mask in ZBrush

[Music] hey what's up guys palominos here and welcome back to this mini series of masking tapes and tools for zebros in this video i'm going to cover the transpose masking tool which is fantastic and there's tons of different applications for this feature of this brush in search but i'm going to show you how i use it for both organic and more hard surface stuff so let's go ahead and jump straight into it all right so here we are in zbrush again i'm using the standard ui of silver so that you can follow along the first thing i want to do is click on the brush thumbnail to bring in my brushes or the palette with all my brushes and i'm going to look for these icons right here so you have the transpose the transpose cloth and the transpose smart mask so this is the one that we're going to be looking at but before i do anything i just want to show you what the or the reason why this is its own brush rather than you know like normal masking brush so let me just show you if i hold ctrl and click on the masking brush you'll see that there is no transpose mask or transpose smart mask in here so it's not like one of the default masking brushes you won't find it if you press ctrl however if you go ahead and select it from here right this becomes your new active brush and it's a brush that you can use to mask things and the weird thing and this is why i wanted to show you that is because now this is your active brush that you can use to mask things and if you hold the ctrl key you can still access other brushes right so i'm going to show you how to use that in combination but um yeah so the first thing is to basically click on the thumbnail select the transpose smart mask you can avoid these two these are completely different so we're just going to concentrate on transpose smart mask and that by default if you again if you're using the vanilla version of the ui and zbrush should bring in this gizmo 3d now this masking technique or this what i'm going to show you works very well with the gizmo 3d but it's not ideal and i'll show you why in a second so the first thing i want to do after i select this brush is to turn off the gizmo 3d and you can do that from this icon right here or press the y key on your keyboard so as soon as you turn that off it looks like you know the transpose goes away but you can still use it so if i go ahead and click anywhere let's say let's find like a more planar area like this if i click and drag you're going to see this line appear and this is basically the transpose line now the transpose line is kind of like the previous version of the gizmo 3d the gizmo 3d this one right here is a little bit more streamlined and easy to understand but this one is incredibly powerful so if you want to spend time um playing around with this again to to move things around because you can move things you can skew things and rotate things all with this transpose master is really really powerful but again that's outside of the scope of this short video so all i want to do is to let you know that this is an actual transpose line so you can utilize it to rotate move scale things out like you would with the normal scale or the normal the normal gizmo the main difference is again if i'm just using the standard brush and just select the move brush now this is the brush that is that it gets selected right so this is why it's a little bit uh kind of like weird but i want to be clear about how it works so let me just do a very very quick recap so if i'm in draw mode and i have my standard brush i can do this just to add details or sculpt if i hold the ctrl key accessing my masking brushes but now because i selected the transpose smart mask that's going to leave in any of these move rotate move scale or rotate switches so i can click on move and now what i have is the transpose smart mask right before by default if i let me just go back to normal transpose by default if i move or if i go to move scale or rotate what series is going to give me is the gizmo and the normal transpose right so let's turn off the gizmo and going back to what i have so transpose master or transpose smart mask so the way that this works is holding control and using the mask so i'm going to click ctrl and click and drag and there we go this is the power of this transpose smart mask so it is very different from any other mask and it's kind of like a combination of the transpose line with masking brushes but it's not necessarily a masking brush that you will access when holding control so i know this one is a little bit tricky but i'm just trying to give you some context before i show you how to use it so i'm going to clear that mask and i'm going to target maybe this area right here so i'm going to click and drag to create that transpose line and the great thing about this is that you can click on the outer areas like these yellow circles and you can adjust it so i'm gonna you know adjust it like this not that you have to just want to show you that you can do it or you can click on the x z or y axis to basically constrain that so if i click on z axis oh sorry on the x-axis now this is going to be like the transpose line is going to be pointing that direction the y-axis so on and so forth all right so the key with this transpose smart mask is that you can mask based on flatter areas so using this tool series will recognize the variation and the difference between angles in the scope so i'm going to hold ctrl again and that is to access my masking brush by using the transpose smart mask so that's the tricky bit so holding ctrl i'm going to go ahead and click and drag now and i'm dragging that is that that transpose line but at the same time i'm sort of like extending that mask and what's great about this is they can you know decide how much oh you know find out the the reach of this mask in here so you see i can just push it a little bit more and maybe something like that just to show you what i mean and let's go back to draw mode and let me bring in my epic pen so you'll see that the difference so here's the the edge of that mask um you see that the difference between let's say this flat area and this curvature here is this angle is very different that's when this tool the transpose smart mask comes into play like and works really nice because it's gonna find out the difference between you know this plane and this plane and it's gonna maintain or respect that line um and you know you can play around with the different angles it doesn't have to be just that one but the default settings work um work really well so let's say that i want to mask out this entire region but i am missing a few spots in here i'm going to show you another really cool tip with this masking so again if i bring in my transpose line and hold the ctrl key i can go ahead and maybe mask this area right here and as soon as i start doing this obviously i lose the other mask right and you see there is a slight difference here in the in the surface and you maintain this nice center line it also depends on which area you start masking so if i clear mask and i start masking around here so easily if i start dragging from this point the new reference plane is this one right here so anything that is uh at the similar normal angle as the one that i click on this point that i click is going to be masked out so let's clear that mask anyway going back to what i was saying if i hold ctrl and start dragging this right i might not be able to cover everything but this is one of the greatest things about this tool that you can also add to existing masking and that is using the shift key so i'm going to hold the ctrl key to start dragging again from this point but as i start dragging if i press the shift key it will add this new point or this new mask to the existing one so again i can hold ctrl click and drag shift and do that ctrl click and drag and shift to add that control click and drag and shift to add that so hopefully you can see how powerful this is especially if you're working on hard surface modeling um you know in this case control click and drag holding shift in this case this is a more organic creature but if you think about it if this was some kind of like helmet or something like that it would be very easy to isolate an area like this right let's go back to draw so we have a very nice clean mask obviously in this case there was not much difference in this area so we can invert that mask and bring in our you know any other mask so i'm going to use the mask lasso mask that area inverted so now we have something a lot cleaner and you know we can also use the the mask pen maybe let's enable symmetry and just clean this up a little bit all right so i'm not going to spend too much on that but this is a very quick way to isolate this area and if i turn on my polyframe so here at the bottom and i'm also going to turn all the lines so that you can only see the colors i can hold the control and w and that's another great thing about masking in in zebras that you can select a specific mask and create a mask with the tools and the tips that i'm giving you in this series and once you have the mask that you want you can hold ctrl and w and that is the shortcut to create a a polygroup you can do the same thing from the polygroup palette so you don't have to use the control w it's just i think it's a lot easier so if you have a mask like this you can also click on group mask and that basically creates a polygroup based on that but let's go ahead and go back and the reason i wanted to show you this additional tip in this video is because once you have a very well defined set of polygroups you can utilize this for a whole bunch of other things so obviously you can hold ctrl and shift to isolate it and hide a specific polygon or you can you know simplify this area you can hide it mask it again bring everything back so you can re um reconstruct that mask and like i said this is something that is very powerful for hard surface modeling but if you're doing a creature and then you want to do i don't know a helmet or something for this creature in the same fashion you can have the mask again we have polygroups and this mask area you can go ahead and let's go to the sub tool sub palette go to extract and we can click on extract click accept and that creates let's also clear the mask on the on the head that creates a new piece of geometry we can see it in solo mode based on that mask with polygroups as well that um that we can go ahead and and polish and this one can turn into a helmet but that's pretty much it so let's go ahead and remove that turn this off so hopefully you can see the value on the transpose smart mask so as a quick recap all you have to do to utilize the transpose smart mask is to go to the pro to the brush palette select the transpose smart mask that would automatically select the move scale rotate make sure that you turn off the gizmo and with this selected hold the ctrl key and drag that's it and you know you can add more say let's go back here click and drag to start adding and you can just leave it there rotate around go again hold ctrl click and drag hold the shift key to add more and and just one last uh little tip that i can give you is that you can also remove pieces of the mask with the alt key so let me just add a bit more so control click and drag holding shift just to add a bit more but let's say that i made a mistake and i went a little bit overboard in this area you can do the same thing you can hold ctrl click and drag right now instead of just holding shift to add more you can hold the shift and the alt key at the same time and that would remove that mask right so i know that this is um it becomes a little bit more cumbersome and complicated when you have to use multiple modifiers but it's just very simple using the you know the tools in silver so control to access the mask and mask that area shift to add that mask or to add to that mask and alt to remove it so the only difference is that you have to use them at the same time so again ctrl click and drag holding shift now after starting the drag and then if i want to remove some of these areas the same thing hold ctrl and click and drag that would start the process of masking a new area if i hold shift i'll make sure that i'm masking you know i'm adding to the mask but if i want to remove instead of adding i'm going to hold the alt key as well so now i'm pressing ctrl shift and alt at the same time all right so that's it for this quick tutorial hopefully you have found this tutorial useful again this transpose smart mask is one of the most powerful things or tools in zeros to define a mask now in the next video i'm going to cover how to create masking from poly paint and using poly groups to create masking so from poly paint to poly group to masking and it's just a fantastic way to keep isolated pieces and it's just another great way to have control over your sculptures so i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Pablo Muñoz Gómez

Views: 1,156

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Id: eAEkoM7H3BE

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021