SubTool Master Tutorial

From ZBrush Info

For this quick tour of SubTool Master's basic features, we'll use the DemoSoldier.ztl that's included with ZBrush 3. Go ahead and draw it on the canvas, entering Edit mode.

First, the figure has only one glove and shoulder guard. Let's fix this. For the shoulder guard, we'll simply create a mirrored copy. Select the "shoulderGuard" SubTool and activate SubTool Master, followed by the Mirror option. In the popup menu, activate Append as new SubTool and leave the X axis selected as shown in Figure 1 (at right). Click the OK button. At the bottom of the of the SubTool list you'll see a new SubTool called "Mir#1_shoulderGuard" as shown in Figure 2, (below).

Now select the "glove" SubTool and follow the same steps. This time, though, switch back to the Merge into one SubTool setting before clicking the OK button. The "glove" SubTool will now update to have two gloves instead of one.

As you can see, the Mirror function uses the model's center point for the mirroring fulcrum. This allows both gloves and both shoulder guards to perfectly fit the character, which will now look like Figure 3 (below).

Next up, we'll combine the character's protective elements into a single SubTool. You should have the glove selected already. Click its visibility icon to toggle the setting for all SubTools. Now turn on the eye icons for the shoulder guards (including the mirrored copy that you made a minute ago), goggles, wristBands and kneeGuards. Activate SubTool Master and click Merge.

You'll be presented with a new dialog box at this point, shown in Figure 4 (at right). Go with the default settings and click the OK button. Because there are a lot of SubTools, this will take a moment to complete. When done, the bottom of the SubTool list will now have a new SubTool that starts with the "Mrg" prefix -- indicating that it was created by a Merge operation. This is shown in Figure 5 (below).

If you had a model with quite a few closely associated articles of clothing, this would be a really handy way to tweak their fit on your character. By merging the SubTools you could adjust their fit all at once. When done, you'd simply use Tool:SubTool:GrpSplit to break the model back into separate SubTools again.

Go ahead and delete the merged SubTool. We only created it as an illustration, and as you'll recall we kept the originals when we set the Merge options. Those original elements are still the only visible SubTools, but if you look at them in the list you'll see how they're scattered around. Let's group them so that they're easier to work with. Activate SubTool Master and click the Shift Up option. When the operation completes, these protective pieces will still be the only visible elements, but they'll now be grouped at the very top of the list (right after the DemoSoldier#1 base model). This is shown in Figure 6 (below).

Assign a new material and color. For example, the MatCap LBrownClay material with sort of a yellowish-green material. Activate SubTool Master and choose the Fill option. Select Color & Material from the popup menu (see Figure 7 at right), then click OK. All visible SubTools -- the protective elements -- will be filled with the new material and color. You'll see this in the SubTool menu, because the hidden SubTools will still be the RedWax material as shown in Figure 8 (below).

Activate SubTool Master and click the Invert Visibility option. All the protective elements will be toggled to invisible, although you'll still be able to see the currently selected SubTool simply because it is selected. Make sure that this is the shoulderGuard SubTool. Press the B key to toggle the base character off. Now select a new material and color, such as MatCap Gray with a brownish-orange color selected. Repeat the Fill operation again, with the same settings.

Now activate SubTool Master and choose Show/Hide All. Because the SubTools are already partly hidden, it will turn them all on. Select the RedWax material again and set color to white. This will better help you see the model's state at this point.

Your model should now look pretty close to Figure 9 (shown below). Notice how the entire model except the soldier himself has been colored and given a material? This is because the soldier is the only element that was hidden for both Fill operations. Something else to note is that one of the shoulder guards doesn't match the other protective gear anymore. This is because it was still selected during the second Fill, even though its eye icon had been turned off.

Now activate SubTool Master and click the Low Res All button. After a moment, every SubTool will be changed to be at subdivision level 1. Use SubTool Master's Hi Res All option to switch back again.

This has just been a quick and dirty tour. Hopefully it will help you see some of the terrific power of this plugin, though, and will have given you ideas for how you can apply it in your own projects.

Happy ZBrushing!