Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we're going to be showing you how to develop a macro that will handle all your needs on the sculpting side of things in your 3D Tools. The first thing you've got to know is a macro starts absolutely from scratch, okay? And it's smart to start from scratch on a macro because you want to be able to open up ZBrush or be in any tool whatsoever, and be able to click this macro and it works. If you don't do it correctly what will happen is it'll error out. So I'll show you the exact steps that I usually take when writing a macro. First I set ZBrush to absolute zero. So, I initialize ZBrush and the Preferences, I'll maximize my window here, go into Tool, drag it back out. And what I'm looking for is any shape that's outside the box, just in case something got mixed. So look, these are all the default shapes. I'm also on the Simple Brush, make sure that happens, okay? Now I'm ready to write the macro so, we're going to go in here, say New Macro, and Yes. See it will initialize again, but I initialize it always twice because sometimes it misses like a polyPrimitive or a texture, or something along the way. Trust me. You can't initialize it enough. Okay, so now the macro has started, and as you can see it says “End Macro” so I'm ticking away here. Now macros in ZBrush [00:01:23 don't run on time, however, it runs on clicks, okay? So, always be maximized so the macro kind of doesn't look kind of [00:01:31 weird when it actually runs, and what I'm going to do here is switch over to my Cube 3D, click and drag out, and hit Edit. Okay. I'm going to turn on Frame for visualization; I'm also going to rotate just a little bit, and then I'm going to go down here to Unified Skin, drop my resolution down to 8, Smooth down to zero, and make a Unified Skin. Being that there are no other tools within the Tool Palette, it knows to go to Skin Cube 3D. So I'm going to go to that, okay. My next step is to lower my sub-division. I had to do that by going to Texture, enabling the UVs, I then went to Geometry, and then Reconstruct Subdivide, one, twp, three times, and then what I'm going to do is Turn Frame Off, and this is going to be Macro 1 of 2. So let's go to Macro and End the Macro. Macros get saved here in C Drive, Program Files 86, Pixologic, ZBrush 3, ZStartup, Macros, Miscellaneous. And I call this Make Good Box, okay? Make Good Box. And when you get done with the macro you can share it on-line, too. If you get a good macro going, you can actually go into these directories; these are just text files, and you can share them with everybody. Okay, so I've got that one done. Let's test it out. Let's initialize ZBrush, let's go in here to Macro and let's click Make Good Box. There we go. Now, I want to Make Good Circle, okay, so here I already have the steps to go in here, but what happens when I get two macros together? Okay, let's do this. Let's initialize ZBrush. Okay, I'm going to hit New Macro, and first I'm going to say Make Good Box. It'll run that macro first, and then what I'm going to do is go into Geometry and divide, but it's not going to let me. It's already divided up. So what I'm going to do here, I want to lower the resolution to a resolution that makes a circle, so I'm going to have to first delete Higher because if I turn on Frame right now I have this. I want to delete Higher, and this time I want to keep a Smooth modifier on it, so what it'll do, it'll take this square and when I divide it, it'll turn it into a circle. And you're like, Wow. That's a pretty pathetic circle. I make everything with this. I love this tool right here. Very uniform circles. I usually sculpt about 75 percent of the time on this and make like Beta heads, okay? Let's divide it, and divide it and divide it. There we go. A ball. Okay. It's a little oblong, not bad. I could live with that. The sculptability of this far outweighs that it's not a perfect circle. By the time I get done mashing this up a little bit and making a head, half the time I don't even care about that little bit of ellipse that's going on on it. Okay, so now I'm done with that macro, and I've rotated it a couple of times, so it's going to look like it's going to trip out here. Okay, so, over here I'm going to say End Macro, and then we'll call this Make Good Ball. Okay, so we've got Make Good Ball, Make Good Box, and later on we're going to have Make Good Plane. In here, let's go to Preferences Initialization, Yes, and let's try out that one. So, this one is going to be running a Script and then ending a Script. Okay, Make Good Ball. Boom. It has an error. It stops it, so now if I click anywhere it'll make the Good Ball. Then it moved it around some based on my movements. So, if you want to make it without the error you would just click delete higher first. I kind of like the space between it, myself, so sometimes I'll put an error in there just to pause it out, but that's just me. Okay, so there we go. That's how you write a macro to make really good geometry within ZBrush.