In a similar vein to sarah's 5 faves, this week I'll be showing off some of my favorite ZBrush commands. These commands are useful to my daily workflow in ZBrush, and are in no particular order
This handy feature helps isolate multiple parts of your model, using an algorithm that groups fused parts and floating parts separately. It's great when working with CT scan data that contains millions of triangles internal/external noise that you may want to quickly get rid of by grouping it together, than deleting it.
The IMM brush allows you insert a mesh onto your current subtool. The IMM uses the same parameters that your brushes use, alowing you to customize how it functions. For example, the zipper IMM uses the CurveTube Brush as its parameter to define how the zipper model is drawn onto the sphere (current subtool). In this case the zipper was drawn so that it can easily and organically wrap around the sphere's surface. This is great for quickly creating zippers for garments.
Edgelooping is a really powerful tool for creating planes perpendicular to, and around a surface to make it truly 3D. Panel Loop gives you the option of closing the surface once on the other side of the loop. This is an amazingly quick tool for taking relatively flat, smooth surfaces and giving them thickness.
Project allows you to transfer detail from a high-poly mesh, to a lower poly mesh (a remeshed or zremeshed model). This is a great tool for reducing uneccesary polygons while keeping the details. Project also works with subdivisions, so you can work with both lower or higher-poly meshes.
As you can see in the image above, the right image shows the geometry of the projected mesh nearly on top of the original mesh, meaning that the details originally lost in the zremeshed model have been brought back using projection. The mesh count stays the same.
Spotlight is a great way to dynamically adjust texture files (image files) to paint onto you 3D model. You can use Spotlight to adjust the image's scale, rotation and position, and also allows more complex manipulations such as cloning nudging,color correcting, and opacity. It allows for more controlled polypainting using specific texture images, instead of just colors.
Oh Yes, I HAD to put this one on there. It's a plugin, but I wouldn't be able to do the work I do today without it!!
It's pretty self-explanatory but there are lots of great options for exporting STL, OBJ and vertex/UV colored VRML files.
HAPPY MODELING and even HAPPIER PRINTING!