[ZBrush] Need Help with masking brush angles

DKeymer3d

Hello Polycount,

I've been practising my sculpting technique in zbrush and expanding my knowledge of the tools. Right now I'm just practising making a few rocks. While i'm fine for the most part there is a common problem I have come across which I want to eliminate entirely. 

In the example below im using the "TrimSmoothBoarder" brush with an alpha to add detail to a flat face on the rock. However if I go to close to an intersecting face I unintentionally sculpt into it as seen highlighted in red. Bear in mind in need a large enough brush size to get the desired effect. I also sometimes use "Once Oni" from the picker.

The best I can think of to work around this is by painting a mask on the opposing surface before sculpting. However this still causes problems with the mask either not being very effective or leaving outlines where the mask used to be. 

Is there a way to mask the brush so it doesn't effect certain angles from the origin angle? Is there another  work around to avoid this? Please advise.

Brain Zapped

If it's easy enough, I'd just mask off (Ctrl+LMB Drag) the area you don't want to affect.  Another option is storing a morph target, and then use the morph brush to bring it back to original.  There might be someone else who can better explain doing it through the brush settings.

musashidan

By nature trimsmoothborder is a very aggressive brush. With the trim brushes you can gain more control over edges by alternating between zsub(default) and Zadd. It takes a bit of practice but does help.The fact that you have a large brush size means it'll always be more difficult to control in tight areas.

DKeymer3d

Switching between zsub and zadd seams the way to go. It helps to fill in holes and areas that start to cave in. I hoped that zbrush would have a built in brush feature that only affects a certain angle range from where it first touches the sculpt (similar to backface masking). 

nyx702

I typically use the Mask Curve or Mask Lasso to isolate a side like this. Make the mask a polygroup for bonus points if you need to access that mask again later. 

jonas_molgaard

I was also like DKeymer3d hoping there was some kind of max angle affected setting you could tweak in order to get more control of the affected area within the brush area. Especially for working with rocks, something like this would be extremely helpful. I experimented with adjusting a bit on the Curve for the brush to make it fall off differently than just liniarely and while it gives a more smooth rounding, it does make it easier to control such points as shown on the picture, however it requires me to switch back and forth with the curve slider constantly, so it's really not that good a solution i think.