ZBrushCentral

HD Geometry

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

What is HD geometry, it sounds great, but I’ve heard all nasty things about that make it sound pretty much useless

example:
"Yeah ZBrush can do more polys (even though they’re not technically polys at all)… there’s just no way to get anything useful out of the program if you’re using the stupid HD mesh feature.

And the texture painting is laughable compared to Bodypaint or Mudbox 2k9."

So what’s HD Geometry?

(Is mudbox better at texture painting? what’s 2k9?)

#2

HD GEO is quite useful inside of Zbrush. It is currently of no use in outside applications, but that is reportedly changing in a few days, as the ability to export normal and disp maps with HD geo detail is listed as a feature of the new update.

Even without HD Geo, Zbrush can push/scuplt more raw polys with better performance than any other application. HD geo is simply a supplemental native mode to amplify the available detail many, many , many times beyond that. Most of the work you see created with ZB doesn't even use it though, as it is overkill in most situations compared to ZB's already formidible poly handling. Body Paint is a dedicated mesh paining app that costs hundreds more than ZB. I would certainly *hope* it is good at what it does. Compared to one of many ancillary features in Zbrush. You may as well say Sure, Body Paint is good at painting meshes, but it is laughable at sculpting polymeshes, quick blocking with zspehere models, projecting geometry, retopologizing models, rendering for illustration, 2.5D painting, etc., etc. etc. ZB is not a mesh painting program...its is a scuplting/illustration program that is *also* pretty good at painting meshes. As far as Mudbox comparisons, there is an "Other commercial applications discussion" thread in the community forum, that has much discussion on the matter. I suggest you head over there and read that, or better, download the demos of the respective programs and see for yourself.
#3

Regarding HD geometry, there’s something that needs to be pointed out:

The amount of data your maps can hold is limited by the map itself rather than the geometry used to generate that map.

Yes, HD geometry can hit up to 1 billion polygons for a model. But a 4096x4096 texture map has a maximum of 16 million points of data. Of those, only about 10 to 12 million are actually used by the average UV mapping. ZBrush can handle that many polygons on most systems without ever resorting to HD sculpting.

I predict that once HD details can be used for creating maps, the forums are going to light up with a bunch of posts from people complaining that they’ve got all these great HD details, but their maps look low res compared to the sculpt. The funny thing is, they’ll be right. A 4k map IS low res compared to an HD sculpt.