ZBrush | Transpose smart mask

Hi Everyone, my name is Michele. You’re watching part 4 of my series on masking in Zbrush. In the last episode, we looked at how to isolate, mask and polygroup the lip area including the mouth cavity using curve stroke brush. Today we will look at how to use Transform Smart Mask, another cool brush to mask in any direction or in today’s tutorial, wrinkles that go any direction we want! Let’s open up a new Femaledemohead project by pressing “,”. Click on project and double click on Femaledemohead. Press “F” to center the model head. Turn off perspective by pressing “P” & turn off symmetry then turn on “Double” under Display Properties. There are two ways you can use Transform Smart Mask. The first, is without alpha. it will wrap the mask around any contour originating from the starting point, best used for overlapping surfaces. A good example would be the tongue. Let’s isolate the teeth subtool and have a look. Go to SUBTOOLS click on skin subtool layer & turn off the EYE icon OR you can click on teeth subtool layer and click on SOLO button to isolate it. Rotate the model so that we are viewing from the top, then zoom in. It would be difficult to isolate the tongue by painting on it or lasso around it since it’s in such close proximity to the teeth. Fortunately for us, ZBrush has a brush called Transpose Smart Mask under Brush, Transpose, Smart Mask. Use keyboard shortcut BTS. the korean boy band name, yeah? Easy to remember. Press on CTRL/CMD and left click and drag down with alpha off. Drag until the mask covers the tongue area you can see, if you drag any further it will start masking the teeth too. Let go of your left click. Rotate to view the bottom of your tongue and You can continue masking the bottom of the tongue by pressing CTRL SHIFT CLICK and drag down on the unmasked area until you have covered the whole bottom of tongue then press CTRL/CMD W. That’s it. This trick is good for areas which are difficult to lasso, challenging surfaces which overlaps. The second way to use this mask isssssss….using alpha! Thats right! One without alpha one with alpha. So simple! Now, let’s apply the mask. BTS. Unhide all to reveal the skin. Divide the active points to amout 2-3 million. Then Press “,” to open up the lightbox and Click on Alpha. Click on Leatheryskin88. We will use this to apply some wrinkles around the eye area. Then Holding down CTRL, Click and drag on the model and hold, watch the top left corner. There is an indication of the size/ units and the angle. The cool part about this mask is you can adjust the angle and size accurately on the model. The anchor point is at the top/bottom middle of the mask, depending on if you drag up or down. Then you can turn it left or right to whatever angle you want to fit into your model. Press spacebar to move the starting point. Wrinkles around the eye usually begins just after the eyelids and runs toward the hairline as shown in this image. Unlike the regular rectangle masks using standard brush, I can scale it and move it around , but I can’t pivot it to any angle I want. Using BTS I can turn it upwards or downwards! One downside or maybe it can be considered a feature, is if you scale it too big and you want to go smaller, you will end up skewing your mask. Like this wrinkle alpha, it becomes elongated and flat. It can be a feature though, depending on how you want your mask to turn out. I’m’ not sure how to remedy this but I think undo and redo the mask is the way to go for now. Alright, if you learnt something new, give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel for more. The next video I will show you more ways to mask! Probably after a video on navigating and saving files. See you in the next video. Bye