Oh my,
Well I might as well just say that I’m of Jewish of upbringing and I hope that no one takes the above comments out of context.
I just want to stress the importance of self expression.
Artists must think higher thoughts, and accept humor as medicine, and we must laugh in the face of what frightens us the most.
agreed:lol:
personally i reserve the right to offend and be offended 
“those of us who take game art serious”… get layd! 
:lol:
Thats what happens when you had a few drinks and hit the forums, wonderful wisdom spews forth.
I happened to pop on to the Topogun site today and noticed that they have completely redone their website. It looks nice!
I was recently approved for the beta, so I look forward to putting it through it’s paces.
-Dustin
Well its released now so i doubt you will get beta access.
100€ is a decent price tho.
Nice, I’d much rather spend @ $100.00 on Topogun then pay for 3dCoat , I just don’t like the sculpting feel of 3dCoat and I would only use the retopo features, which I was wondering how to import the ZTool into 3dCoat anyway, looks like Topogun is just the tool I am looking for.
Yay my first ever ZB post
I have both zb3.1 and 3d coat. Total breeze to save out of zbrush and into 3dcoat as .obj, couldn’t be simpler.
From what I can see of topogun, it has has a lot less features than 3dcoat, eg voxol sculpting etc. BUT… Topo is lower cost than 3dcoat, but as both apps have free trial, its worth looking at them both in some depth. 3dcoat can be installed on as many comps as you like, but the licence can be active on only 1 machine at a time (per licence). Simple to activate/deactive online, takes about 30 secs.
I actually had 3dcoat before zbrush, and so far I much prefer the retopo of 3dcoat, as much as anything because its simpler to see the new poly edges as they are drawn, and no faffing about with zspheres.
A good summary might be
For a feature richness list top to bottom
Zbrush
3dcoat
topogun
And no surprise, cost is in same order. All have their place just a matter of what feature/s each user is looking for.
I have beta tested for a couple of programs in the past, and have never seen such a rate of updates and new features than those that are added to 3dcoat. In fact its recently got to the point of me skipping release versions through sheer tedium of installing almost 2 new versions a week at times. The developer seems to be some sort of programming machine the speed at which bugs are fixed. and new features brought out, it’s quite a revelation to see it unfold at such a bewildering speed, I’ve never seen anything like it!
As a slight aside, I use a recently purchased wacom cintique and am right handed. When voxol sculpting in 3dcoat it is a welcome relief that the pesky pop-up panel for changing brush size etc, doesn’t appear right under my drawing hand, as it does in ZB, drives me nuts that 1 
Voxols are a load of fun too, though currently a little wip ish. To date using the wacom I can spend hours sculpting in either zbrush/3dcoat just for the sheer joy of it, I highly recommend the cintique it just feels so “right” in either app.
I would assume there will continue to be a need for beta testing as no doubt topogun will evolve more, if it has any hope of staying viable, in what seems to me to be a recently very HOT area of 3D development thats blistering forward by several companies, no doubt spurred by competition, and an increasing demand in this area.
My 2c worth… try em all extensively before buying.
Ok I am outta here lol. I only came on to see if zspheres2 and goz for pc released yet, man am I stoked about upcomming zbrush features, awesome, more than I could ever dreamed of even only a couple of years ago Seems not THAT long ago I was using deluxe paint on an amiga and thinking it was fantastic 
Cheers
IK Handel
Well, It’s not like I don’t think 3dCoat is a good program, I just like to concentrate on what I’ve developed with ZB. I have no creative limitations with ZB so I’m not hankerin’ for a new app, just ZB 3.5.
Hi, I’ve been a dedicated Zbrush user since the day version 2 was first released…It was like the modeling Gods finally had mercy on poly pushers when the ability to brush on millions of polys became possible…now…I appreciate that ability still,…but one thing that has always been troubling, was that within Zbrush you mostly were locked into the shell of geometry that constituted your base mesh; this just meant a lot of pre-planning or bouncing in an out of another package like Maya,…which just discouraged a lot of creating in one package…
I recently tried the latest version of this program 3d Coat (the new alpha)…and it introduces (I know it isn’t the first, Sensible Technologies had something similar) voxel sculpting…check it out at this link here:
http://www.3d-coat.com/v3_voxel_sculpting.html
basically you can branch out, mush and merge seperate pieces, and cut holes in a way that you can’t with traditional poly’s, and currently cannot do in Zbrush…its pretty bizzare, but you can literaly just paint strips of geometry in mid air and join them together like clay;
Now I’m certainly not here to promote another package on a Zbrush website; because this package just lacks the sculpting sophistication, brushes, ect that Zbrush has, I don’t feel compelled to use it instead, rather I wanted to bring it to the attention of the guys at Pixologic and ask that they might consider investigating this kind of technology for a future release of Zbrush…I believe digital sculpting HAS to go some direction like this,…we cannot continue to be locked to one model,…eventually there needs to be a way to propogate form and create with one package and without much complicated steps (at least in achieving initial form,…sure for export to another package retopo is neccessary)…
I know there are problems and complications with voxels, one being that it requires a uniform res for the mesh…perhaps there can be a voxel sculpting tool for blocking in basic/mid level form, and then an option to bake it to polys for more detail work,…I’m not really qualified to trouble shoot the technical difficulties, but there seems like a lot of opportunity if it were thoroughly looked into…
anyways, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on this,
-J
I just posted a topic like this on the Zbrush4 wish list. If Zbrush had a brush that painted on additional geometry it would save people from subdividing their mesh just to get extra polys in one area. I am not a fan of local subdivision as it leaves nasty seams. I also agree that Zbrush is better than 3D Coat. In fact, I’ve tried using 3D coat and it runs extremely slow on my computer with simple models. Zbrush runs fast and I am able to create complicated models fairly quick.
I’m sure they’ve never heard of voxels or 3dcoat 
Sorry could not resist. In all seriousness the future is probably something along the lines of 3D acceleration dying and polygonal models dying and both being replaced by something more like Carmack’s sparse voxel tree ray tracer.
The more detailed you get, the more triangles start to suck ie they have huge file sizes. Voxels on the other hand can be stored very efficiently. On older hardware it was just not as feasible to do ray tracing and renderers like that on older hardware were also something not many people could do.
Hence 3D acceleration, which made a higher level API that just did the low level part for you. Now we have graphics cards with 400+ cores and the move is towards making generalized instructions, because it’s just too hard to make the crazy hardware and software drivers. And expensive.
Instead we will probably get raytracers (such as larrabee) and once we get that then triangles stop making sense any more so we will have voxels instead. Not just for rendering any more but also how we store our files. Also, the files will use materials like a software renderer of today (these are all ray tracers) so the burden of making artwork for 3D games especially will be dramatically reduced.
The 3D coat guy seems amazingly smart, but I am not sure one loan programmer can power through The Next Big Thing all by himself, especially as much larger companies like autodesk can sort of strongarm the whole market instead of just making a product and hoping the stars line up in such a way as to make it a big success. Considering how fast he seems to work, he might start nipping at the heels of mudbox and zbrush very soon, though.
I think voxels are a great way to achieve volume quickly and intuitively, but I must say the Polys will never die, when used properly they are very efficient.
I could see blocking out masses with voxels and then retopoing them which is what I think folks are doing.
There just won’t be any point to use triangles any more if you go to raytracers. The whole point is that efficiency is no longer so much of an issue. Efficieny of labor is much more important. Retopoing and creating lots of maps is a huge time waster. I spend about 90% of my time with art doing things that have very little to do with artistry.
If you eliminate triangles, that reverses. Also, the more triangles you get the more unwieldly the model. Not just for working with yourself but for processing on the machine. 20k poly model is a ton of work to make adjustments on.
I can agree, especially for organic modelling, but i wonder if polygons are still more practical for hardsurface, mechanics, architecture ? I don’t see traditional modelling disappear anytime soon. however voxel sculpting is great! i’m all for it.
Oh yes, VOXEL sculpting is the way to go IMHO !
ZBrush would be unmatched with the following workflow:
1 create base mesh with ZSpheres
2 convert to VOXELS and sculpt general form with voxels
2 retopo (with better retopo tools than currently available)
3 sculpt finer detail on retopoed mesh (which ZBrush already does greatly)
When you see what’s possible with voxels in 3DCoat, then surely Pixologic can not longer ignore this!?
Unfortunately : I’ve searched the 3DCoat forum and IMO 3DCoat still is too buggy.
So I hope that