Excellent work on making Zbrush even greater! Thanks Pixologic! Those renders look SWEET! 
I agree with Morph Division in regards to a Material Creator (node based), would be great! Perhaps in v5?
I’d love to see more Presets (defaults and user saved/managed) added to various parts of Zbrush; instead of repeating tasks for various things (again hopefully in v5).
My job is doing illustrations to newspapers and this is just what I need! I hope the instructional video goes really in-depth. I would gladly even pay some money for couple of hours of rendering and material instruction on ZB4r2b.
you shall not take the Lords’ name in vain!
If Feature Film and Broadcast were the only customer base you would have a point. However that market is rather small, while the market of Artists and Hobbyists is huge, not to mention the value for Concept work. Seems like those in specific fields think only they exist at times.
If you go back in history you will find that ZBrush was developed by an artist for artists, not just those in a specific aspect of a specific industry.
Would you rather have a potential of millions of customers or a few thousand?
For me the main reason I use ZBrush is not professional. I do, do lots of desktop publishing and occasionally work for others, but mainly for me ZBrush is a hobby I enjoy, having been an artist my entire life. I’m thrilled about ZBrush and how Pixologic has kept it affordable and not forgotten it is for art first. After many years of laying my art aside, ZBrush revived my passion. There simply is no substitute for it, nor does anyone else seem interested in doing anything similar. ZBrush fills more than a single niche.
These new rendering features are wonderful and to be honest not that hard to figure out if a person actually wants too. I jump back and forth between ZBrush and other software with Node systems without difficulty and I’d think Pro’s in feature films and broadcast could do so even easier as they spend far more hours than I can in this stuff. All I have is a few hours of spare time a week.
Anyway, thanks so much for everything Pixologic. Greatly appreciated by me and I’m sure the many other artists who have found this wonderful program.
+1
Awesome job ! Can’t wait to play with it.
great render!It would be nice if pixolator shared the project file with the BPR settings, filters and materials… not the head, just the settings.
on the whole render thing, personally if I could do absolutely everything in Z instead of 3 or 4 programs, damn straight.
Or skip intermediate programs and go straight to AE for post, hells yeah.
I hope they keep it up forever and once more, everybody say it with me:
Free is in the budget
really awesome!
But, There is no hair and eyebrows!
Hair/Fur feature is desired in ZBrush 5.
this looks great, pixo guys… really looking forward to try this out.
-r
complicated process
… woaw
It wouldn’t need to be node based, but simply a way to ‘cook’ ‘bake’ a set of attributes into one material.
therefore removing the need to blend materials which have more attributes than you need. As is demo’d in the video.
For example,
From a list you would add what you want then ‘bake’ / ‘cook’.
add sss, spec, 2spec, textures, indirect, direct, reflection etc…
This material is now saved and can be used.
The difference being only the attributes you need are present.
This would also be awesome for brushes too.
The one thing which is annoying about materials and brushes is even though you can save them out, tweaking is more an exercise in going through seemingly endless attribute lists.
Its great to have that much customisation, but when you got what you want it makes sense to reduce the screen clutter.
Hence bake or cook material and brush.
Also being able to apply a texture as well as an adjustment curve to any material attribute is needed, if you really want shading in zbrush to be helpful.
BTW, I’m curious why a hdr envirnoment wasn’t used?
it will probably never happen, but it would really be awesome if shading done in ZB could be exported in other apps, like Maya and applied through their shading system. As it is now these features are very useful at a concept stage, but at the end, work would have to be redone in traditional 3D pakages.
is there any reason some sort of bridge app like goZ could not eventually translate material properties from Z to whatever?
Maybe not a translator but a plug-in suite like GoZ that would handle the differing aspects but use the host software.
blue skying here, Im no programmer but that would be super cool if we’re stuck with having to use other products.
But it seems to me Z is getting much more sophisticated and I can imagine a time when all the features we see
elsewhere show up in Z, of maybe a Z-suite of sorts? hmmm, anyway still cool, and with Pixologic I believe anything
is possible.
I think the best we can ask for is a shader/material which ‘follows’ a similar logic to other apps.
e.g For SSS, simply an epidermal, subdermal, backscatter, diffuse, overall.
In other words an Add and a multiply.
I agree with some posts that asks for a more cg like pipeline for shading, it will be much easyer, but I think that pixologic is so much revolutionary exactly because they think outside the box, with new and creative ways to do what we are used to do already, but in a new and fresh way… over time it can be prouved to be a wrong direction, but for now it is just a new direction, maybe it will get to be a revolutionary way for doing shading as this develops further, i don`t really know yet, what i know is that it is working for me as an artist, i use it to experiment alot, then when i am done, i will retopo the model, unwrapit and use polypaint as my base texture, then i will finish it in my 3d app, for now… the future may change this workflow a lot… i sincerely believe that UVs and bitmaps are in a countdown to extinction… and then shading with suffer a deep change as a process… just my two cents…
@ AndreHolzmeister +1
I do not want to follow the ‘logic’ of other apps
yeah that would be awesome. I think we could learn a lot from that
Awesome…:D:D:D Simply amazing
I don’t suppose… Could you, or someone else, explain how to get transparency / opacity (like shiny glass or an eye cornea) to work? I just can’t seem to get good results. Do I have to start with a particular shader?</SPAN>
WOW…nice rendering