As a new user I can’t comment on the board activity, competition versus collaboration or many of the other observations folks hove mentioned so far. But what I can say is this:
If I were to post an image, getting pats on the back does make me feel good, but primarily I’d be wanting feedback. I’d probably be posting an image with a question as to why something didn’t turn out the way I expected.
I’m on several other 3D forums and by far the Zbrush one is the most active one I’ve seen. You should see how competitive the Electric Image forum is. I know there are many other newbies to that program hovering in the background, but are terrified to post. I’m one of them. The pros there have a very strong clique because they’ve been using the software for 5+ years and bought it back when it was $3000. It’s now much cheaper and newbies are jumping on board. But there’s no real space for them to ask the questions they need to. The pros are so far above their heads that they tend to get ignored or get a curt remark. I personally have only posted a couple of messages on the two EIU forums…on one I’ve been totally ignored…no one has even said hello. On the second one, I was patronized for not knowing that I needed to have a “well formed” object in order for a bevel or rounding operation to work. When I asked what he meant, he meant my bezier curves weren’t well drawn. Well, he was totally unable to understand that not being perfectly drawn was my point. I wanted that “handmade” non-symmetrical kind of look, like claymation. After a few attempts at communication, I dropped it. The clique had already moved on and I was being ignored again anyway. Oh well, I digress. I guess this is just a verbose way of saying, that things are actually very healthy here. Folks are much more cooperative, sharing of tools, materials, scripts etc…than almost anywhere else I’ve seen. I’ll probably be selling my EIU license soon since the Zbrush and Pixels communities seem to fit my style better.
Oh…and one last thing. The quicklinks page has been a godsend. I’m printing out PDFs, and playing scripts like a mad thing trying to get a handle on Zbrush. The folks who put together the year long compilation of modeling threads with images and turned it into a PDF. That was awesome! I can attest that I’ve never seen that anywhere else.
So…from this side of the fence, Zbrush and the Zbrush community ROCK! 