ZBrushCentral

Z3 & Z4 - Grow a Mask

I’ve seen this question come up before, and never thought much of it when people have responded that it’s not possible- but this weekend I was working on something where I needed to do just that, and I’ve found a method for actually growing or shrinking a mask- in addition to some other cool tricks using the same principles.

  1. First, draw the mask on your mesh as normal, using whatever masking techniques you wish:

step1.jpg

This trick will work in all versions of Z3 and also Z4, so it’s been around for a while waiting for somebody to stumble over it. I imagine something like this can be easily scripted into some sort of automated process, but it’s simple enough to where it’s not completely necessary either.

One obvious downside of this method is that you are not able to see the rest of the mesh as you grow your ‘mask’, but with some trial and error and pre-planning it hasn’t been that big of a deal in my testing.

The other downside is that this method of mask growth is binary- the polygon is either 100% masked, or not at all- it does not preserve any mask fading at any point in the process- so you will need to take this into consideration when you are planning out your mask. For my purposes, it was sufficient to draw the mask, and then rely on BlurMask/SharpenMask to get the final softness i was looking for.

Anyway, hope this helps somebody, and hopefully Pixologic will implement proper mask growing in a future update!

Attachments

step2.jpg

step3.jpg

step4.jpg

step5.jpg

bonus1.jpg

bonus2.jpg

Good to know. Thanks for sharing.

You can get around that by snapshotting the model to the canvas before you begin. Snapshot is in the Transform palette and will drop an image of the model in it’s current state directly to the canvas. Then you can hide and grow while still seeing the model.

When you’re done, hit Ctrl + N to clear the canvas of the snapshot.

Magnanimous!!!

:smiley:

You can get around that by snapshotting the model to the canvas before you begin. Snapshot is in the Transform palette and will drop an image of the model in it’s current state directly to the canvas. Then you can hide and grow while still seeing the model.

When you’re done, hit Ctrl + N to clear the canvas of the snapshot.

I’m a bit late to the party here but you could also duplicate that SubTool and use Transparency or Ghost if you really needed to see the rest of the model while you use this.

WOW!! Thanks for this detailed instruction!

great thread! thanks for sharing this useful trick!