From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Inflating and deflating an entire model at once - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

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Inflating and deflating an entire model at once

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- Here's another quick tip that's similar to the last one. There are a lot of times when you might want to quickly inflate or deflate an object. Basically making every point on the surface move outwards or inwards. So let's see two different ways of making this happen. Now the first way is with the move manipulator. And I use this trick quite a lot. If you go into the move mode and then click anywhere on your model's surface you're going to get this manipulator and it has a beginning end where you click and it has the opposite end which is going to be facing away from the surface of the object. And if you right click and drag on the inner red circle of that end point what you'll get is an inflate effect. If you move the cursor one way it goes out and you move the cursor the other way it goes in but we can't see it because it's going inside the model but if you go far enough it will turn kind of inside out. But anyway this is really useful for clothing because you can kind of expand it out to the amount that you want. Alright that's the first way and it's a pretty straight forward way. I'm going to hit control Z to undo this however and let's look at a different method for this. So we've still got this extraction of a vest active but you can see it's sitting directly on the surface. So what I want to do is come down to the deformation palette and we're going to be working with the inflate settings here. Now notice you can just drag this and it's pretty much the exact same effect. Go the opposite direction it goes inside out. Okay I'm going to hit Control Z to undo that. What I want to do is save a macro that inflates by just one small amount. So let's go up to macro, new macro. Make sure we hit no. And now I'm just going to tap on inflate and type in "1". Okay, so we've got a very small amount of inflate. So this can make it easy to control inflation by just very small amounts at a time. Now let's go back up to macro, end macro, and let's go save this in our ZBrush installation folder. On a Windows machine it's going to be in program filesx86, let's go to Pixalogic, Zbrush version number, let's go to Zstartup, Macros, Misc, and let's save this as inflate. Okay now let's do this same thing but with deflate. I want to go to macro, new macro, new, and then I'm going to tap on inflate and type in "-1". We'll go back up to macro, end macro, let's save this as deflate. And now what I want to do is assign hot keys to inflate and deflate. So I'm going to go up to macro and let's find okay we got, let's do deflate first. I'm going to hold down Control, Alt and click on deflate and I like to hit F1 for deflate and then Control, Alt, click on inflate and set that to F2. Okay let's try it out. I'm going to hit F2 a few times. All right so you can see with every time I hit F2 it inflates a little bit. Let's try F1. Yep, works great, deflates a little bit every time. So what's useful about this, is if you want to inflate or deflate multiple objects you can make sure you're inflating or deflating by the same amount on each different object as long as you hit the same number of keystrokes for inflate or deflate. So let's say I inflated the vest five times, now I can Alt click on the pants and hit F2 five times and that way I would know I was inflating by the same amount.

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