From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

Toggling subtool solo and transparency modes - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: ZBrush: Tips & Tricks

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Toggling subtool solo and transparency modes

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- [Instructor] In ZBrush you can make an object transparent, and you can also make it so that all other objects are made invisible, so you can focus on just one of them at a time. It's controlled with these two buttons here, Transparent and Solo. If both of them are active at the same time, it doesn't actually give you any extra benefit. Oftentimes, I find myself wanting to switch from solo mode to transparent mode, which means turning off solo mode and then turning on transparent mode, and vice versa, turning off transparent mode, then turning on solo mode. It's like hitting two buttons, when you really just wanna do one thing. In this video, I'll show you a macro that can simplify this workflow. Let's record a new macro. Let's go to Macro, New Macro, and always hit No here, unless you know what you're doing. Now let's just store some commands. I'm gonna turn on transparent and then turn it off. Turn on solo, turn it off. Now when we save the macro, we'll have some commands to work with like raw material, for making more precise and controlled macros. I'll show you how that works. We'll just go to Macro, End Macro. Let's save this in our ZBrush installation folder, Program Files, Pixologic, our version number of ZBrush. Let's go down to ZStartup, Macros, and Misc, and we'll just save this as Solo. Now let's open this macro in the text editor. Here's the macro in my Misc folder. You can see there's four commands here, one to turn on activate, which is actually activating the transparent mode, and turning off transparent mode, turning on solo mode, and turning off solo mode. We know what the commands are for these. First, let's make the macro to turn on and off solo mode. If I'm turning on or off solo mode, I want to turn off transparent mode. Let's get rid of this command for now. This command will turn off transparent mode. We can get rid of this command, because we don't want to turn off solo mode, but we do want to toggle it. Let's change this to a different type of command called IToggle. Now, every time we run this macro, it's going to turn off transparent mode, and then if solo mode is on, it'll turn it off. If solo mode is off, it'll turn it on. Let's go ahead and save this file, save. Now all we need to do is switch this around for the other macro. I'll just change that to Solo. Change that to Activate. We can save this as a different name. Let's change this to Transp. Let's go back to ZBrush and see how this works. We'll go to Macro, Reload All Macros. You can see here, we've got Solo and Transp. If we hit Solo, you'll notice that just turned solo mode on and off. We've got solo currently on. Let's see what happens if we hit Transp. Okay, so it just switches to transparent mode and turns off solo mode. If we turn off transparent mode, it just goes back to the regular view. This is exactly what we wanted. I've got these saved as a hotkey, just to make it really easy to use. We could hold down Control and Alt and click on Solo. Now it's asking us for the hotkey for that. You could set it to whatever you want. I like to set it to s, and then for transparent, hold down Control, Alt. Click on that, and I like to set that to a. Again, you can set it to whatever you want or not set it at all, if you don't find this useful. Just using the hotkeys, it's really easy to switch back and forth. I know it's a small, little thing, but it actually speeds up my workflow.

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