ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ Alphas 131

The Stencil Menu

From the top of the screen, select the Stencil menu. Use the radial button to tear this menu
off to the side tray on the left. This menu is the control hub for how stencils behave and dis-
play. The first button is marked Stencil On. This is the on/off switch for the stencil. The Invr
button will invert the stencil, flipping the black and white values.
You’ll find the remainder of the Stencil options beneath these first two buttons. The
Alpha Repeat slider will tile the current stencil. Set this to 6 to see how a seamless scale
texture is created. This is because Alpha 62 itself is a seamlessly tileable alpha (Figure 4.24).
We’ll cover how to make your own tileable alphas later in this chapter.
The buttons marked Stretch, Actual, Horiz, and Vert will fit the current stencil to the
canvas. Stretch will stretch the stencil to fit; Vert will fit it vertically. See Figure 4.25 for an
example of these buttons in action. When these buttons are on, Interactive will turn off.
Interactive will reactivate as soon as you invoke the coin operator to go back into Interactive
Placement mode.

Wrap mode is one of the most useful
stencil modifiers. Wrap mode will project
the stencil so that it conforms to the shape
of the underlying mesh. Figure 4.26 shows
the stencil in Wrap mode. Notice how it
conforms to the shape of the nose and eye
socket instead of just sitting above it. You
can further define how tightly the stencil
wraps to the underlying detail by using the
Res and Smooth sliders.
The final selection of buttons in the
interface deals with the way in which the
stencil is displayed. Sometimes the stencil

Figure 4.24 Alpha Repeat set to 6 Figure 4.25 In this image Alpha17 is loaded as
a stencil and Stretch is on. The stencil stretches
to the proportions of the canvas.

Figure 4.26 The stencil wrapped to the demo head