Zbrush is just awesome...

[MRico]

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=074539

Can't wait for it!

[BigJohn]

Incredible. I'm particularly psyched about all the hard-surface stuff. It's been long overdue if you ask me. Maybe we could finally kiss subdiv modeling goodbye?

Coupled with the way these new zspheres work, it may finally be possible to.

But.... Gotta wait until it's actually out and see for ourselves :)

Looks pretty impressive so far though

[sinz]

The hard surface brushes are godly... wtf this is looking crazy good, way to go pixologic! and PAINT while you sculpt? wOw and the new noise mind blowing updates.

[Mrpearlzildjian]

Simply amazing. Maybe I will stick with ZB after all instead of learning Mudbox...

[Ritorian]

Insane. I cant wait for that, soon as i get it, I'm gonna go nuts with those hard surface brushes.

[Marcus Dublin]

The new Zspheres functionality looks sweet but I don't think the hard surface brushes will replace tried and true subd modeling just yet. Although it's a nice step in the right direction.

Also it would have been nice if they implemented some sort of Smooth Shading. I mean what the F$%Ck :mad: are they waiting for. It seems like an obvious feature to add to the software updates. That aside I can't wait to get my hands on this stuff, I need to get back to some Zbrushing.:cool:

[Marcus Dublin]

Simply amazing. Maybe I will stick with ZB after all instead of learning Mudbox...

I wouldn't right Mudbox off just yet. Give it a try and play around with some of the brushes, you just may like it;). Mind you it's way behind Zbrush as far as the feature sets go but it's a beast at what it does well, which is bare bones poly sculpting.

[MRico]

What I personally would like on the new version is mirror masking/hiding. For example, when you drag a selection to mask or hide...it really bothers me that it's not mirrored.

Also, sometimes when I'm trying to make polygroups there's always those stupid 1-2 faces on the low poly that I just can't drag-select, I wish there was a feature to like...click on the faces, kinda like what Mudbox does.

[Ritorian]

The new Zspheres functionality looks sweet but I don't think the hard surface brushes will replace tried and true subd modeling just yet. Although it's a nice step in the right direction.



ya it def won't replace the subd/polygon modeling method yet, but it sure will be fun to play around with those brushes.

[Lamont]

The hard-surface stuff is great, but I like the control I have in Maya/Lightwave. And the noise thing is kick-ass.

[Maph]

That noise is beyond brilliant! Instant rock/grunge/dirt-ify button! :D
And ZSpheres 2 looks like the tool I've always wanted, but never had. :)

[ReplicA]

I'm very curious about the zspheres 2 stuff. What they've shown looks great, but I wanna know if it will function the way they portray it. The planar brushes look neat for sure, wanna experiment with those for a while. Not gonna replace sub-d modeling stuff at all, but could be really helpful on certain projects. The noise thing looks like something I won't be using at all, but could be useful for others.

There's still a feature I'd LOVE to be included, and that would be to be released on time!! That's one of the most frustrating aspects of pixologic, promise, don't deliver, promise more, then release later. annoying

[BigJohn]

Also it would have been nice if they implemented some sort of Smooth Shading. I mean what the F$%Ck :mad: are they waiting for. It seems like an obvious feature to add to the software updates. That aside I can't wait to get my hands on this stuff, I need to get back to some Zbrushing.:cool:

Not sure what you mean by this, but if you're talking about like in max putting all your model on the same smoothing-group so it's not faceted, you can do that already in zBrush. You're talking about having the low-poly look smooth, right?

But yeah, there are some features that seem REAL basic and yet they don't have them. My number1 thing is how come painting is tied to polygons? It's even called polypainting. But I want pixel-painting like Mudbox, bodypaint, deep-paint, and now even 3dsmax have. And it should include real-time projection painting.

What's odd about that, is that they have those features in there in some shape or form. Just not the usable shape and form. You can already do projection painting, but have to go through projection master which makes it useless. And you can already paint on the model, but have to have it super subdivided, which also makes it useless (for the purpose that I want to use it for)

[Marcus Dublin]

You're talking about having the low-poly look smooth, right?

Yep! I'm used to the way it works in Zbrush but it feels very archaic when compared to Mudbox. I'd go so far as to say that I would make complete switch to Zbrush if this feature were included. Having to view my mesh/tool in faceted form is annoying to say the least and requires more work from me to get the same results that I can get in Mudbox.

[BigJohn]

If you go under Transform, and turn off Quick 3D Edit, then under Tool->Display Properties, you set DSmooth to 1, you get a similar effect. But this effect is crap for very low-poly meshes. I find it good for mid-range meshes.

But yeah, it's not as good as what we're all used to from our other 3d apps. Go figure...

[Guedin]

Wow ! The next update looks really promising ! The hard suface and quick dirt tools are just awesome.
I'm so agree with you Marcus. I can't even understand why it's still impossible to see smoothed polygon !!! I really hope they'll implement it in the next update cause for me it seems so obvious that ZBrush lacks this feature.

Also I would be more than happy if we were able to display normal map on the model and be able to still paint our texture over it. Right there's just a BumpViewer Material, and you have to load you bump texture in the texture slot to display it, which make projection painting impossible.

[Mike_K]

yeah this will be incredible. the new zpheres are just immense, it looks like you can really get down to some quality concept modelling and inventing fresh designs quickly, which is great for the people who like to think more in 3d than 2d

also with 3.5 we will be able to subdivide into billions, this is going to save a serious painload of work of retopoing meshes mid-way through sculpting

i think the new hardsurface tools look amazing, i think the ones atm are capable of creating anything that max/maya can do, so with these new tools combined with the billion polygon models I think that it will be superior

[BigJohn]

To subdivide into billions, won't you need a ton of RAM?

The cap right now is 4gigs for 32bit environments. And I guess it's practically limitless for all intents and purposes in 64bit (which I don't know if ZB3.5 is). But I wonder just how much ram you can fit in a system. It made me think too that ZB4 coming out (the true 64bit version) may make the amount of ram we consider standard to shoot through the roof.

[ReplicA]

First off, BigJohn, thank you for typing, "all intents and purposes" instead of "all inTENSIVE purposes" like a lot of net people, it reminds me the maybe literacy is not actually dead on the net when people can type what they mean, rather then what they think they say. ;)

Back on topic, I don't think 3.5 will be 64 bit, at least I read some complaints about that on ZBC. And the whole billions of poly's thing, who would need that much? Being serious, I've never seen anyone need that many poly's, for any job. 100 mil is pushing it. There might be some jobs that have alot of objects, that might push 100 mil, but billions? That seems like a marketing ploy to get all the numbers people, and people with their pc specs in their signature, all hot and bothered, but doesn't have any real application in an actual pipeline. when was the last time you were working on a character and thought, "damn, I wish I could divide this guy 100 more times, so I could realy get in there and ad some pores!" We can already do that at about 20 million poly's.

All that is not to say I'm not looking forward to zb3.5, don't get me wrong. The planar brushes, and ZSphere's 2 look like they have a lot of potential, and I can't wait to get my hands on them.

[BigJohn]

Yeah, so maybe not billions, but I have pushed my machine to the absolute limit before. Where I can't subdivide anymore and need to retopo in order to keep going. But then, I'm on a pure 32bit system, meaning zBrush doesn't come even close to having the full 4gigs.

[Shadownami92]

First off, BigJohn, thank you for typing, "all intents and purposes" instead of "all inTENSIVE purposes" like a lot of net people, it reminds me the maybe literacy is not actually dead on the net when people can type what they mean, rather then what they think they say. ;)

Back on topic, I don't think 3.5 will be 64 bit, at least I read some complaints about that on ZBC. And the whole billions of poly's thing, who would need that much? Being serious, I've never seen anyone need that many poly's, for any job. 100 mil is pushing it. There might be some jobs that have alot of objects, that might push 100 mil, but billions? That seems like a marketing ploy to get all the numbers people, and people with their pc specs in their signature, all hot and bothered, but doesn't have any real application in an actual pipeline. when was the last time you were working on a character and thought, "damn, I wish I could divide this guy 100 more times, so I could realy get in there and ad some pores!" We can already do that at about 20 million poly's.

All that is not to say I'm not looking forward to zb3.5, don't get me wrong. The planar brushes, and ZSphere's 2 look like they have a lot of potential, and I can't wait to get my hands on them.

I guess one way to look at it is that rather than being able to make billions of polies on screen that you can do the same amount with less memory usage and stuff. I know my first attempt at using zbrush was on a laptop thats a but outdated now using 2 Gigs of RAM, anybody else who might have those limitations might find it a turn on. Although I would say even that could be a rare case nowadays.

But yeah to me it sounds like they optimized it a little more allowing you to have more polies, or possibly less memory usage on your computer for the same stuff which sounds great to me.

[Elcura]

I'm wondering, if it's better to have a 64bit OS when you have a lot of ram or if a lot of ram will help regardless of what your OS is. I wonder what the limitations are with 3.5.

[Maph]

I'm wondering, if it's better to have a 64bit OS when you have a lot of ram or if a lot of ram will help regardless of what your OS is.

If you have over 4GB of RAM (which I would recommend) then yes, a 64bit OS is needed. Memory allocation in Windows is maxed at 2GB per app plus another 2GB for the OS itself.
In a 64bit environment the limitations are set by the mainboard (and the OS in the case of windows :yawn: ). My mainboard can have 64GB of memory, but WinXP pro 64 is limited to 128GB physical, whereas winserver2003 can allocate up to 2TB of physical mem. But if you were to have 128Gb or 2TB of memory, I'd say that's a tad overkill. :D

Anyway, I'm hoping for a true 64bit version of Zbrush. Zbrush's memory management is down right amazing, but I would lurv to fully utilize all my memory. :)

[BigJohn]

I'm wondering, if it's better to have a 64bit OS when you have a lot of ram or if a lot of ram will help regardless of what your OS is. I wonder what the limitations are with 3.5.

Look at it this way, 32bit = 4gigabytes. (2^32)
64bit is just... huge... to quote from the wiki:
The emergence of the 64-bit architecture effectively increases the memory ceiling to 2^64 addresses, equivalent to approximately 17.2 billion gigabytes, 16.8 million terabytes, or 16 exabytes of RAM.
This number is so huge that modern 64bit OSs chose to limit it. I think vista64 is 128gigs or something. Either way, it's overkill.

If you're using a 32bit OS, like say Vista32bit, then Windows can only "see", or be aware of, 4gigs of memory. These 4gigs aren't 4gigs of ram, they're 4gigs of memory (basically 4gigs worth of addresses). So... say your graphics card has 512mb of memory on it, that means that now there's only 3.5gigs left of memory addresses to use for ram.

The same can be said for applications. So since zBrush is 32bit, it can only be aware of 4gigs. This is why it's beneficial to be on a 64bit OS, if you can, eventhough zBrush is 32bit. Since under that scenario there's a much higher chance that zBrush will get access to the full 4gigs, depending on how much ram you have. As it stands right now, with zBrush32bit and Windows32bit, you're probably only getting around 1.5-2gigs of ram for zBrush usually, and that's if you're maxed out and have 4gigs of ram installed.

And as far as I know, none of this changes for zBrush3.5. It's still a 32bit app. When they say that it supports 64bit, all that means is that it'll run in a 64bit OS, but it's still 32bit.

[g0zzie]

i just got goose pimples, the new surface noise options look awesome for adding in that final high detail quickly and without lagging a low specced pc <3 zbrush, i just hope those hard surface brushes wont be as bug as i think they will be. :think:

Also with the new zspheres less time on making base meshes to export into brush, happy times :)

[Mike_K]

it's not so much the fact that it go to higher poly limits, but the fact that it can handle them more easily... dont know about you but my machine is a god damn pain at anything past about 14 million, sometimes even the strokes lag, so knowing that i can crank it up to 100 odd million and have it sculpting as smooth at does it now at 1 would be amazing.

assuming this billion thing is accurate ^^

[BigJohn]

That's kindof a catch-22 in a way. With the move to 64bit, the memory limits on how many polygons you can use will start to go away. But the catch is that when you go that high, all that load will now fall on your CPU and GFX card. Before it didn't have to, because the maximum polygons you could get with the amount of memory 32bit offers, was something most machines could handle.

So without getting new hardware (cpu or gfx card) to support it, I guess the only thing they can offer is optimizations to the code to handle each polygon better.

If they can make it even 1-instruction more efficient per polygon, that's essentially a billion instructions per cycle they're saving if you're working with a 1-billion polygon model.... in theory.

So who knows, it may be great. Gotta try it and see hehe

[seven]

doin the release dance.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=074989

[KEDavidson]

i don't about you guys but this one sounds pretty sweet to me

"Improved perspective with a floor grid "

[TheDarkKnight]

Don't know if this is the right thread to post it in but was wondering how sculpt stuff as seen in the pictures below?

Read stuff like




........

for sculpting i use clay,standardbrush with lazy, pinch and flatten brush , but the most is pinch. using pinch with and without alt(zadd zsub) give really different results

.....

But I just can't seem to make it work.

Anyone got any good tips or like a good video that demonstrates a good technique?

Thanks in advance ! :)

[cookepuss]

If you've just gotten the 3.5 upgrade, try the new planer brushes. They're designed specifically for this task. Pixologic has more than a few instructional videos on them here: http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/

Without 3.5, assuming I want to stay in ZB for this, I'd probably break that armor down into retopologized & thick extracted sections. Any extra hard surface detail I'd have created using a combination of clay brush, masking, & flatten. Using 3.5 makes it all MUCH easier though.

[TheDarkKnight]

If you've just gotten the 3.5 upgrade, try the new planer brushes. They're designed specifically for this task. Pixologic has more than a few instructional videos on them here: http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/

Without 3.5, assuming I want to stay in ZB for this, I'd probably break that armor down into retopologized & thick extracted sections. Any extra hard surface detail I'd have created using a combination of clay brush, masking, & flatten. Using 3.5 makes it all MUCH easier though.

Thanks for the tips, still have 3.1 (which is what I'm going to be using at school aswell so dont want to upgrade just yet.

If anyone has any tips on how to do it in just Zbrush with brushes or wants to make an extra buck (;))teaching me the technique....

[morte]

Hey am i the only one who is in fact disappointed with the new planar brushes? It's quite ironic that faraz created one of the most strong hardsurface pieces in Zbrush ever a little before zbrush 3.5 came out. Zbrush 3.5 which was supposed to provide us powerful tools to do hardsurface stuff. I am happy with all of thse Lazy mouse new option but the planar brushes as they are atm does not work for me, and the old method to do hardsurface(clay/standart to build up the form, the faltten/smooth to smooth exact areas, and the pinch to fix edges) is still the best. I was so hyped about those brushes and now i can't make anything decent with them.

[ReplicA]

I agree, morte. I had high hopes for the planar brushes, and I'm pretty disappointed by them so far. I might find some way to get them to work the way I want eventually, but I wanted them to work that way immediately. The flatten brush changes are rather annoying as well. IDK if it's the UI setup I have on mine, or what, but the brush mod slider's disappeared making it harder to adjust how the flatten brush works.

I do like the new perspective mode, some of the new brushes, and a few other things. Just saying that to help balance out what I said about it not rocking nearly as much as I had hoped.

[KewopDecam]

The new Zspheres functionality looks sweet but I don't think the hard surface brushes will replace tried and true subd modeling just yet. Although it's a nice step in the right direction.



I agree with this especially in a production environment where art directors and leads are constantly changing stuff. Hard surface in Zbrush is cool, but it seems hard to tweak some drastically without have to redo a lot which isn't the case in traditional high poly modeling.