Lightbox

Lightbox is a browser which can display the content of folders located on your hard drive.

Lightbox

Lightbox browser displaying the Project tab

Lightbox will display the content of the folders located in the root folder of ZBrush, by categories: Documents, Tool, Brushes, Material, Alphas, Textures, ZScript and Other.

At anytime, save your own content by using the default ZBrush Save/Export buttons for each item: Brush > Save as, Texture > Export, etc. You can save your content in your own folders and browse them with Light Box.

You are able to save shortcuts in Lightbox. If you have an external hard drive you can put a shortcut in the ZBrush 4R5 >ZTools folder so that will always be there when you load Light Box.

If you would like to access your own folders in the Other tab just save all of your Texture, Alphas, and etc in the ZBrush>ZExportImport folder. How when you click on the Other tab all of your folders will be there.

To open an element, simply double click on it. If it’s a 3D model / ZTool, it will be automatically loaded. If it’s material, it will be loaded and selected.

  • Double-clicking on textures or alphas will load them into Spotlight.
  • To load a file into the Texture or Alpha palette, hold Shift and double-click.
  • Holding Alt and double-clicking will open an image in its default editor, or in the case of web images, open the original web page in your browser.
  • Alphas should be grayscale single channel files, either 16bit or 8 bit. Grayscale images that are three channel (RGB) will be loaded into the Texture palette.
  • Ideally use PSD file format. ZBrush will only load TIF files that it has created.

The shortcut to show or hide Light Box is the , (comma) key.

Lightbox Navigation

Lightbox offers several ways to navigate and display its content:

  • At the top, click on one of the category names to display and browse its content: ZBrush, Documents, Tool, Brush, Material, Script and Other. These hyperlinks refer to ZBrush default folders.
  • On the right of these default folders, click on the left or right arrow to switch from one category to another.
  • Click on the left folder with the up arrow to go up in the hard disk hierarchy.
  • Click on the other folder icons to enter in these folders.
  • On the top right, choose to display on, two, three or four lines of icons.
  • Click and drag on the inner edge (nearest the center of the Canvas) of the Lightbox window to scale it up or down: it will change the size of the content preview.
  • Click and drag in the content, including on a preview icon to move on the left or right the Lightbox content.

Spotlight tab

The folder for saving and loading Spotlight files needs to be created before the Spotlight tab will work:

  1. Create a new folder in the ZBrush 4.0 main folder called ZSpotlights
  2. Save your Spotlights to this folder and they will appear in Lightbox under the Spotlight tab.
  3. You will then also be able to create a new folder from the Lightbox Spotlight tab if you wish.

Light Box Preferences

In the Preference > Lightbox sub-palette, are the Lightbox settings, including the function it takes to open at ZBrush startup. Uncheck the Open At Launch option to make Lightbox close when launching ZBrush.

Several options allow you to change the look and feel of Lightbox and also the number of threads used to create the previews of the displayed content. More threads will mean a faster display of the thumbnails.