Undo History Movies

You can create a movie from your model’s undo history.

While sculpting with ZBrush, you are always turning around your model, zooming in and out or changing the model’s position to focus on a portion of your model. Simply playing back a recording of your sculpting session can be awkward to watch due to all these movements. The Undo History feature has controls to overcome this and make your recordings more enjoyable for viewers.

ZBrush has several actions and options located in the Movie palette and Movie > Modifiers sub-palette to alter movements to create smooth movies.

Movie palette showing Undo History controls

Movie palette showing Undo History controls

Within the Movie > Modifiers sub-palette, you will find options related to creating movies from the Undo History. Notice that Spin Frames and Spin Cycles have an impact on the Undo History movie.
As with the usual method for creating a movie in ZBrush, your history recording can be combined with BPR rendering and even BPR filters. The process is easy. Simply do a BPR render of your first frame, add your desired BPR filters, then launch the Forward or Backward history command.
If you are using a background to illustrate your model creation, the Light >> Background >> Rotate with Object mode setting will synchronize the animation as well. If you wish to have a static background, disable this mode.
Click the F/B History buttons located in the Movie palette to play the history in a forward (F History) or backward (B History) direction from the current history point. This action is similar to the Turntable function and will not only play the actions, it will also record them as a movie, ready to be replayed or exported.

Important!

Notes:

If you are in a record mode, clicking on the F or B History buttons will add the current movie to the existing one. If you do not wish to have these several movies overlaying each other you can click Delete to clear all previously created movies.

Press the Escape key to stop the F/B History recording

Undo History Movie controls

HFrames (History Frames)

The HFrames slider, located in the Movie >> Modifiers sub-palette defines the quality of the transition between each recorded history operation. A low value will create a movie with no interpolation. A higher value will create a movie with better interpolation between the operations, similar to a blending transition between your strokes or operations. Increasing the HFrames setting will have an impact on the movie recording time and the final movie playback speed because of the extra frames added to create a smoother movie.

HRecenter (History Recenter)

The HRecenter slider, located in the Movie >> Modifiers sub-palette defines how much the mesh position will be re-centered on the document. A high value will keep the mesh position at the center of the document whiledocument while a low value will keep the mesh position similar to what it was during the creation process.

HOrientation (History Orientation)

The HOrientation slider, located in the Movie >> Modifiers sub-palette defines how much the original mesh orientation during the sculpting phase will be captured in the movie. A high value will keep the mesh orientation similar to what it was during the creation process while a low value will reduce the mesh orientation and create smoother rotations during movie playback.

HPosition (History Position)

The HPosition slider, located in the Movie >> Modifiers sub-palette defines how much the mesh position will be maintained as the model was moved and scaled during sculpting. A high value will keep the mesh position similar to what it was during the creation process while a low value will minimize the mesh movements and create smoother playback.

History Camera Path Smoothness

The HSmoothness slider, located in the Movie >> Modifiers sub-palette defines how smooth the camera path will be interpolated. A higher setting will have a smoother interpolation of the camera from the original movement during the creation process.

Note:

If you wish no camera movements for your recording put the HOrientation, HPosition and HRencenter to 0. You must also set the Movie >> Modifiers >> Spin Cycles to 0 and Spin Frames to 1.