Hi,
A friend showed me ZBrush2 in action the other day and I had a little go and although I find some of the concepts and UI a bit irksome at times (I by no means have really got to grips with it - besides my background is programming not art) but otherwise I find it a very interesting package.
My focus is in its use is for the generation of normal and displacement maps - especially with regards content creation for next generation platforms. What would be most useful in this area would be modelling and preview support for n-patches (As supported by some ATI graphics hardware) coupled with displacement maps - and I was wondering if this had been looked at?
Also I was curious as to how the normal map renderer actually works - as it seems it is raycasting? but seeing as how Zbrush works I would have thought it didn’t need to do it this way? If it does raycast it would be nice to have further options like Cryteks polybump has for example.
Also I would like to double check on how your displacement mapping works. Is it simply the ‘normal’ method such as:
p’ = p + displacement§*normal§*k (k?)
Where displacement§ is between -1 and 1
I look forward to following the progress of ZBrush in the future as it looks to be shaping up to becoming a very useful tool indeed for the games industry.
Warrick Buchanan
Senior Tools Engineer
Argonaut Games Plc www.argonaut.com