Hello Artists,
This thing is something that I’ve been talking about with some co-workers and fellow artists for some time, and even though it seems like an obvious conversation, I haven’t found actual involved discussions about it. It is no one’s surprise that Zbrush is a challenging tool to wrap your mind around when you first start to learn it. It might not be a hard tool to use by itself if you approach it in a vacuum, with no previous baggage or pre-conceived ideas, but if you are familiar with any other 3D programs or even the standard Windows environment “logic” (which pretty much covers the vast majority of the population), Zbrush is a Rosetta stone to decipher, with a suite of unique and (to the outsider) whimsical design decisions to grasp.
Once you learn it, you become quite confident with it, but that doesn’t take from the fact that things like “pixols”, having to start from a Zsphere to retopologize, not being able to middle-mouse-scroll through subtools or creating a somewhat odd set of planes to do some approximation to CAD-like hard-surface modelling seem far from intuitive even to the frequent user, and as new features get added, the interface suffers from an increasing feeling of being stockpiled, often requiring to check tutorials to see how does the logic of those new additions operate within the Zbrush UI parallel universe, let alone returning to Zbrush after some time of being unaware of the new features and trying to learn them.
Don’t take me wrong, I think Zbrush is a wonderful tool. It has revolutionized the industry in many ways, and it does the job significantly better than the competition, for the most part, and I haven’t switched programs for a lot of reasons, including an amazing free-upgrade and pricing policy and excellent community, among others. But I can’t ignore the fact that the tool seems more and more each day like a victim of its origins as a 2.5 tool (aspect barely anyone uses anymore) when it comes to the UI design, to the point of being alien not only to newcomers, but for the conversations I’ve had about the topic, even to seasoned veterans that use it almost daily and seem to almost unanimously agree in silence.
To me, it’s got to a point where whenever I hear about a new version of Zbrush, I only wish for one feature: the absolute overhaul of its interface and many of its concepts from the ground-up, to something intuitive and integrated into the Windows/MacOS layout. I understand that from a company’s standpoint, it is a very dangerous move risking themselves to alienate their audience with some complete revamp, and since their mindset seems to be a “keep adding features” approach, they might not have the intention to fix something they don’t see as broken. On the other hand, I know I would be absolutely happy to pay for a hypothetical Zbrush 5 whose only new feature would be “being intuitive and designed for expanding in the future”, and I would happily learn it again. I also perceive the people I’ve talked to agree with me in the topic, but since the sample is quite small, I wanted to throw the question to the public, to see the general consensus, if any.
That said (sorry for the wall of text), what are you people’s thoughts on the issue? Don’t you see an issue at all? Would you mind to re-learn the program from scratch if Pixologic completely overhauled the interface? Really curious about your thoughts 
Cheers
Abel
