Problem has been present possibly since getting the iPad, for about 8 months.
The button on the UI where Pivot edit, subtract/edit, relax, normal, etc. are located(tool depending on the brush selected), will randomly be selected on its own, even when I am not interacting with my iPad. It happens anywhere from every 5 minutes to every 30 minutes or so. Maybe sometimes every hour. I noticed that the button will also be activated when I switch tools, regardless of my choosing or if I had it pressed with my last tool or not. often, when I am working and I feel like sculpting isn’t working or is excessively difficult and won’t do what I want, I found that it is the result of that button randomly pressing or activating on its own. So relax is enabled, or pivot edit gets turned on, or normal is on, or fill is on instead of remove/vice versa(the easiest one to notice while sculpting). Sometimes I think the program is unusable because sculpting is so difficult, but then I look back at recordings and realize that the button in that space of the Ui was enabled unknowingly.
This is because you’re inadvertently double-tapping the Apple Pencil. The flat spot where your index finger may typically rest is intentionally sensitive to double-tap as a FEATURE. There is a setting in the Nomad App to turn this off… under the GESTURES icon > Pencil double-tap
When this is invoked, your Apple Pencil doesn’t need to be physically touching any part of the screen.
At first I wasn’t terribly thrilled this was happening either, but if you give it a solid chance, it might turn out to be super-helpful.
Under old-school sculpting with ZBrush, the free hand is usually resting near the PC keyboard’s SHIFT, CTRL, and ALT keys as nearly every Pixologic brush has an alternate function. Since a large swath of folks sculpt with a bare tablet, this is one additional aid from Nomad to make up for the lack of immediate keys. Just be extra-mindful of the extra taps.
In my recent sculpting sessions, I’ve boosted my muscle-habit to around 60% of the time relying on double-tap to toggle between masking and unmasking delicate areas. Out of that, the “accidental” toggles feel like it’s dropped down to 10% of the time.
Even for beginners who KNOW this feature is in place, I think the main reason they despise/reject it is that the toggle action isn’t noticeable until they lift their concentration AWAY from the sculpt and have to glance over to the side-icon to troubleshoot… Every. Dang. Time. Intermediate users start learning that their brush cursor changing colors is another sign of the toggling taking place. Because IMO these scenarios are NOT sufficient warning, I WISH @stephomi would consider adding an audible tone for the change of toggle-state. As I get faster in my sculpting progress this might save those precious fractions of a second where I DON’T have to glance over to trouble-shoot why my brush is behaving wierdly.
Do you know if there is a possible way to lock this button for all tools or set it off by default? I very rarely use this button(normal, relax, fill, etc.). Even with the gesture for the pencil off, a lot of the tools have the button on by default, so I have to click it off every time I use the tools. It doesn’t stay off when switching tools or when opening new sculptures/files. I would rather take the time to turn it on then turn it off each time I swap tools(very frequently).
It’s certainly not normal if all the Alt-States for all the brushes are turned ON at App-launch.
I’m on v1.82 of Nomad, but I don’t think the default behavior has changed going back as far as I can remember. Mine launches with all brushes in their NORMAL state.
Each Nomad brush’s Alt-State (I call it this because Alt/Option on the keyboard invokes this whether using ZBrush or Nomad) is discrete — distinct to that brush. Toggle it ON for that one brush and it remains ON for only that brush when you return to it.
How an iPadOS app closes (and whether it truly does) is beyond the scope of this thread, but when Nomad truly gets closed and restarted, all the brushes for me are reset to their normal state. None are toggled into Alt-State.
This may be a valid isolated bug for you or a misunderstanding of Nomad un-suspending itself from the background holding onto its toggled Alt-State brush settings.
Save your current sculpt. Open a NEW one that will give its default sphere. Searching “close iPad apps” on YouTube should demonstrate my suggestion to cleanly close out Nomad. On completing that, launch Nomad again. All the brushes should be in their NORMAL state. If this is not what you’re experiencing, I’d suggest directing this to @stephomi
No, saving and opening a new file, then closing nomad didn’t work for me. But I think I figured it out. I selected each brush one by one and one by one, toggled that fill, etc. button off, then saved each brush after toggling it correctly. I think I was pressing the pen gesture double tap so often by mistake that I saved brushes with the fill, etc. button on without knowing it. So they were always on when doing anything(choosing a new brush, opening a new file, etc.). So now they are saved correctly. Hopefully it stays that way…
