Floor Grid

Core-Draw-Grid

The Floor Grid section of the Draw palette

 

Open and Save with LightBox

The Open and Save buttons allow you to save your current reference images and grids setup for other projects. Opening a previous grid arrangement is often the quickest way to set up a new one.

LightBox has a section which can accept your saved grid presets so that they can be quickly loaded into ZBrushCore. To make sure your grids display in LightBox, save them to the ZBrushCore/ZGrids folder.

Floor

Floor Grid (Y Axis )

Floor Grid (Y Axis)

Press Floor to activate the floor grid. The grid can be turned on for different axes by clicking the axis letters at the top of the icon. Turning all three axes on in the icon will activate a floor grid on every axis.

Elv (Elevation)

The Elevation slider sets the position of the grids relative to the model. Normally the Elevation slider would be set to -1. To position the grids so that they intersect at the center of the model set the value to zero.

Snap

When enabled, Snap moves the active grids from bisecting the object to being outside its bounding box. This positions them so that they are positioned behind the object, in the appropriate place to serve as supports for background images.

Disabling this option keeps the grids at their origin position, centered on the current SubTool’s geometric center.

Fill Mode

The Fill mode slider, located near the top of the Draw palette defines how the grid will be displayed.

0: The grid is displayed with no transparency.

1: The grid is displayed with slight transparency.

2: The grid is displayed with strong transparency.

3: The grid is displayed with slight transparency and the model with smart transparency. In this mode, the polygons facing forward will be more transparent while those near the edges will be more opaque. The visual effect is closest to a Fresnel effect, producing the best visibility when working with references. You can modify this display mode with the Edge Enhanced and the Edge Opacity sliders, located in the Visibility section.

Grid fill modes

The four fill modes, from left to right and top to bottom. Notice that mode 3 (the 4th image) is the most useful, but having dark colors can make the overall visibility more complex.

Front

This mode, located to the right of the Fill Mode slider, is enabled only for Fill Modes 0, 1 and 2. It displays the model with flat transparency to see the background through it.

Front mode

Front mode, on and off

Front mode does not have transparency modifiers.

Grid Size

The Grid Size slider changes the size of the grid.

Tiles

The Tiles slider will adjust the number of tiles the grid has.

E (Edge) Enhance Factor and Opacity

These sliders are enabled only when the Fill Mode slider is set to 3. (See above for a description of this mode.)

The Edge Enhance Factor slider affects the detection of the angle used to determine transparency.

The Edge Enhance Opacity slider modifies the opacity of the background image. As a result, it alters the overall strength of the model’s opacity.

 


blobFront-Back

The Up-Down and Left-Right sections have exactly the same options.

Front-Back section expanded

Front-Back section expanded

Image Selectors

Two selectors are available, letting you select different images for the inside of the grid (first selector) and back/outside of the grid (second selector).

If the corresponding grid was previously disabled, assigning an image using these selectors will enable the grid.

These selectors are also used to disable to replace the current image.

One

This mode uses the left image slot for both sides of the grid. If an image is loaded into the second slot, it won’t be displayed on the grid.

PLine (Projection Lines from Cursor to Axes)

Projection Lines go from the cursor to the corresponding working plane.

This mode projects a line from the cursor to the visible Floor grids with the corresponding axis color. The position is displayed in the ZBrush title bar. These lines make it easy to ensure that your sculpting work remains true to the reference image.

Switch

This function swaps the textures loaded into the associated grid’s slots. The inside texture will be moved to the outside position and vice versa.

Adjust

This option opens a dedicated image editor, similar to ZBrush’s JPG exporter with which you can manipulate your original image directly within ZBrush.

The most common use of the Adjust window will be to crop the image. It is also useful for changes such as improving the contrast of your reference images.

Rotate, Flip and Inverse

These functions provide basic manipulation to rotate the loaded reference image by 90°, flip it horizontally or invert its colors.

If you wish to flip your image vertically, simply rotate it 90° twice and then flip it.

Scale, Angle, Vertical and Horizontal Offset

These four sliders manipulate your image within their respective grid so that you can fine tune the image’s rotation, scale and position.

If your image moves partially outside of the grid, it won’t be cropped.

Note: It is not possible to directly scale an image larger than 100%. Instead, increase the Grid Size value, after which you can use Scale to reduce the image’s size as necessary.