I went back through Michael Pavlovich’s ZBrush intro series and found a lot of really great tips that I had forgotten or found overwhelming when I first started learning ZBrush, so I decided to include these tips that were too advanced for me as a beginner all in one place. I’ve omitted things that are commonly discussed in most ZBrush tutorials and included tips I think are more beneficial when you become more intermediate with the software.

• Double clicking on the light gray vertical divider opens and closes a sidebar, one on the right and one on the left
• When using a curve graph, drag a point off the curve to switch between linear and curved. If you want to get rid of a curve, drag off and unclick. If you want to reset the curve, click the reset button
• You can only clear your canvas in non edit mode
• “Save as startup material” button on material tab changes the default material
• You can turn off the undo history bar in preferences
• “R” clears your brush palette preview if it gets loaded
• “Clone’” clones a single subtool, while “copy/paste tool” copies an entire toolstack. Both of these do not preserve undo history
• You can open more than one tool at a time with “load tool”
• Saving a project saves camera angle and all tools + material, render settings, lighting, etc
• You can add as many tools as you want, but you can only have one project at a time. If you have a project, want to open another one only for the tools without getting rid of what you have, use “load tools from project”
• ZDocument files store cam angles, mat info, lighting, etc, doesn’t include tools. It’s pretty redundant
• Save project: tool + document
• Save tool: tool only
• Save document: document only
• Quicksaves are project files, change the amount or it’ll seriously eat space. Or delete them regularly
• Shift+S creates a snapshot of your tool. Same things happen when you are in 2.5D mode and drag then go back to edit mode. Ctrl+N to clear all the snapshots