Customizing Your Interface

From ZBrush Info

ZBrush 3 allows the user to create their own interface by moving existing interface items around as well as creating entirely new interface items such as buttons and palettes.

ZBrush's interface is composed of:

• Palettes or Menus
• Sub-Palettes or Sub-Menus
• Trays
• The Shelf
• The ZScript Area

The image to the right highlights each of these different interface areas of ZBrush 3.

Controls For Customizing Your Interface

Placing Controls On The Shelf

The shelf is the area around the canvas area, and you can add frequently used controls to it (or remove controls that you don't use.)

Any permanent part of the interface can be added to the shelf. In other words, any elements that are present when ZBrush launches or is initialized. Elements that cannot be added are those which only appear after something else has been selected. Such elements quite literally do not exist at any other time, and so cannot be added to the shelf.

• While holding down the Ctrl key, drag any element out of any palette.

A copy of the element will be created, which you can place anywhere in the interface. Note, you cannot drag buttons onto the canvas.

• Drag from the color selector on the left shelf to any empty portion of the shelf below it.

When you drag out of any color box, including the large thumbnail from the Color palette, the cursor becomes a picker. When you release the cursor, the color that is beneath the picker will be selected. This is like an eyedropper tool.

• Click on the white tab above the interface element that you’ve dragged onto the canvas.
• Click Preferences>Interface>Colorize

This colors the white tab to match the current color. Since we just set the color to match the shelf, the element now matches it as well.

When you bring one of these new items close to the one you already have on the canvas, they will attempt to dock with it. This makes it easy to build blocks of elements. If you hold down the Shift key while dragging, the element will still dock, but with a small space between itself and the other element(s). You can use this technique to build groups of related items. You can also change the way the organization of docked elements by holding the Ctrl key again and moving them around individually.

• Without holding down the Ctrl key, click on the bar above the block of elements. Use this bar to move the block around as a group.

When you move close to a part of the shelf, a line will appear around that area. This is meant to make it easy to spot the shelf regions. There are four of them to each side of the canvas, above it, and below the ZScript window at the very bottom of the interface. This fourth area is initially empty. When anything is placed in any portion of the shelf, it will automatically expand to accommodate the new item(s). There is a limit to how much it will expand, but by the time you reached it you would be seriously cutting down on the amount of space available for the canvas.

• To remove an item from the shelf, hold down the Ctrl key and click it.

Using these techniques, the items that you find that you use the most will always be able to be within easy reach, and in a method of organization that makes the most sense to you.

Creating a Custom Palette

Lets look at how you create a new palette in ZBrush 3 and populate it with a few interface items.

1. First, press Preferences: Custom UI: Enable Customization.
2. Then create a new palette by pressing Preferences: Custom UI: Create New Menu.
3. Call it My Brushes
4. Make sure that your menus are all visible along the top. If they are not press Menu in the upper right of the ZBrush interface.
5. Open your new My Brushes palette and press the orange circle in the left corner to send it to the tray.
6. Open the Macro: Macro: Brush sub-palette
7. Press CTRL and then click and drag one of the brushes in this palette to your My Brushes palette in the tray.
8. To save this palette, make sure to save your configuration by pressing Preferences: Config: Store Config or Save Ui.

The Custom Palette Area

The Custom Palette Area allows you to complete the process of customizing your UI. Press CTRL and drag each of the palettes you want to remain visible to this area between the shelf and the palettes. Then, simply unpress Menus in the upper right of the interface to hide all the default menus.

You will be left with only the palettes that you placed in the Custom Palette area. Check out the image to the right to see where the custom palette area is located.

Saving Your Custom Interface

Once you've customized ZBrush, you'll of course want to store your changes so you don't need to set them again every time you start ZBrush. You can save both a default configuration that is opened whenever you start ZBrush, and any number of other configurations that can be loaded explicitly at any time.

Saving the Default Configuration

• Once you've customized the UI as desired, click the Preferences:Config:Store Config button.

ZBrush will give you a message that your settings have been saved successfully. The keyboard shortcut for this action is Ctrl+Shift+I.

The saved configuration will be loaded every time ZBrush launches.

Saving a Configuration

While the custom configuration is the one that will load automatically when ZBrush launches, you are not limited to it. The Preferences:Config:Save Ui and Load Ui buttons make it possible to create a variety of specialized configurations for various purposes.

For example, you might prefer to have one configuration for sculpting, another for texturing, and a third for lighting and rendering. There is no limit to the number of configurations that you may create. Each of these configurations saves the current color settings. However, by default, those settings are not loaded. If you would like to load the saved color scheme along with the layout, hold down the Shift key when you click the Load Ui button.