I been wondering about that also, in the Sig05 recap, it shows a very nice photoship friendly UV island. It would extremely useful to have a UV unwrap tool that can create this within Zbrush(for those that dont rely on other tools for UV mapping), this way the connection between PhotoShop and Zbrush is that much tigher out of the box.
I cant imagine painting on square UVs in photoshop and trying to make sense of which part of the mesh im painting on.
call it a request 
Sonk
it seems we will get the best of both worlds with the zapplink pu…the distortion free uvtiles and the ability to use photoshop with them…just like magic!
I can’t wait.
huh? i dont see the distortion free uvtile island anywhere, as a feature of 2.5. got a link?
having distortion free UV island like the ones in the Sig recap video is a must for zapplink to be useful, for people,without other means of UV unwrapping. square UVs would be a nightmare to work with in PhotoShop…
You guys are right on the money when it comes to taking care of your customers. I can tell you really love your program. Thanks for all the hard work and the many updates.
Marque
I think the point that he was making was that with Zapplink you now dont need to worry about uvmapping anymore. From what I can tell with Zapplink you can very easily drop your model to the canvas and then ‘grab’ a snapshot of it that will end up in photoshop. You paint on the snapshot in photoshop and then go back to Zbrush to update your models texture. I think this is a great approach, you don’t have to worry about UVmapping your mesh (use AUVtiles or GUVtiles) and have the ability to use photoshop for texturing your models in a painless way.
Theres a two part video demonstrating this and other cool tricks with Zapplink availible for download on ZbrushCentral. The video makes it seem like switching between zbrush and photoshop is pretty ‘mindless’ (thats a good thing!)
Cheers,
Xarf
Woot i’ve seen all the vids i could find relate to 2.5 update and Siggraph too. i have to say the new features are realy amazing! i liked the possibility to work together with Ps or other program supporting.psd, as well as topology tools an d rigging tools.
in the recap vid there’s a part i don’t fully understand about UVs. it seems like UVs are displayed realtime after painting on the model like sorta showing the various divided parts of it . the model is splitted and islands flattened!! seems lilke magic.
another question i have is :
after having constructed a low poly mesh with a good polyflow for animation over an hiper detailed one with topology tools is it possible to extract the disp map between the 2 meshes?
You’d just export the maps from the high-poly like normal, then use them on the low poly. The relation between the two is nothing technically special, except for the rigging capabilities, of course.
Retopologising looks great in the vids! I thought Silo’s topo brush was cool but these new tools can be used so fast…
ah so i should go for a normal map instead of disp ?
the reason i’m asking is because i would like to model directly from z spheres in ZB till i get an hiper detailed geometry. then, build a new topology upon the rocking model with the new tools. finally, thake the new model into a 3D app and there apply the (normal?) map to have all my detailed model upon a good topology for animation one.then, start animating!! hope this makes some sense.
yeah from vids i see that u can also use that tool to build up geometry like clothes and so on. way cool!
I think this was asked before, but any hints, or timeframe when the rec’d system requirements for Zbrush 2.5 will be out? before dec?
Also with the new 20 million poly limit, will our current systems be able to handle double the polys ie. if my limit before compact mem was 4 mil, now its 8 mil polys?
im assuming/hoping things have been streamlined, you dont need a 64 bit system with 8 GB of ram to work with the new polycount.
any info?
Answered in the very post you’re replying to.
Optimal system specs are not yet known – they’re still optimizing.
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The Displacement Exporter is now released. See this thread.
Great!
waiting for its out~~~~~~~
aurick, unless both versions are released I wish you be more specific when making statements like that.
The PC version of displacment exporter is out. The Mac Version is not out yet.
Apparently all that is considered is that the version that ‘counts’ is out.
Xarf
Excellent!
This is EXACTLY why we don’t like to give release dates at all. We would much rather work on things until they are 100% ready for release, and then simply release them. Unfortunately, ever-increasing pressure from the community forced us to finally give release dates for these new features.
The simple fact with software development is that a single bug can throw things way off schedule because the fix for it impacts other things which in turn affect other things. It’s very, very hard to give accurate release dates, and we don’t like to even try. But as I said, we were forced.
We chose September 22 for Displacement Exporter because we believed that both the PC and Mac versions of the plugin would be ready at that time. We wanted to release both at the same time. As things turned out, they weren’t both ready. So we held to our release date – one that we’d been forced into giving in the first place – as best we could and released the PC version. Since then, we have been working our tails off trying to get the Mac version ready for release as well. We thought it would only take a couple of days. Things got more complicated than that.
Would you have preferred that we released the Mac version the same day as the PC version – never mind the fact that it wasn’t ready, and so you wouldn’t have been able to actually use it? But hey, who cares that you couldn’t use it; all that matters is that it got released at the same time, right? I can’t believe that. It sure wouldn’t show that we care about our Mac users. But the fact is that we do care about you. We care enough to not release to you something that is not ready for it.
We are working very, very long hours trying to get this out to you as soon as possible. We will release it as soon as possible, but not before it’s ready. Please stop complaining about the fact that it’s not out yet and instead appreciate the fact that we cared enough about you to not release something that you ultimately wouldn’t have been happy with.
Thanks.
You shouldnt even bother responding to that sort of thing. Plus it comes from a place that is dead, the age old pc-mac thing. That alone shows the sort of circular reasoning that supports it. Hey, best of luck for the rest of dev road, everyone knows your all doing your very best, and it shows in the app. Roadmaps change. App’s come and go. And you for shure have the respect and understanding of most of the users, be the release dates changed, stretched or whatever.
I have to agree with aurick, a lot of folks were applying the pressure for release dates–dates that they themselves weren’t even sure they would be able to deliver on.
Pixologic may just have to go back to the “it’s done when it’s done” approach.
random thought: aurick were you at the last usergroup meeting? I wanted to shake your hand. I know I stayed behind after it was over and met taron and pixolator, I even saw ryan in passing, but I didn’t see you.
Don’t worry Aurick, I’ll wait until it’s ready. Take your time to get it right. Then when it’s done, I’ll be happy to use the cool new tools!