I’ve only recently been able to try out the new features of 3.5 r3 (was busy when the upgrade happened). And want to know what the consensus is on some of the changes.
Much of what I’ll have to say will probably come across as grumbling. So, before I begin I should say that I am not unhappy with ZBrush and what it allows me to do. On the contrary I’m amazed and thrilled with the power of this program. I am almost drunk with the power to create cool art that is in my hands, and really should be using it rather than reading and talking about it. Yet I am ambitious, even greedy and I want more. I want to be able to do everything I used to do in older versions, and I want all the features I love about every other program out there to be available to me in newer versions, which I expect to be released tomorrow! Really I just want to work in a way that makes sense to me.
In an older version of ZBrush one of the tutorial scripts showed how you could make a unified skin of a zsphere armature as the starting point. Unless I’m just missing something small in the process this is no longer possible. I guess this is because of the sketch Zspheres, which, when converted to a skin show up without any influence from the armature of original zspheres.
There are times when it is useful to be able to make unified skins from the original zspheres, no? I mean, if unified skins are useful at all, I would think.
In ZBrush 3.1 a tutorial showed how you could make a cube with standardized polygon flow, as opposed to the cube 3D parametric tool inside zbrush, by making a unified skin with subdivisions set to the lowest, 8 and smooth turned off. Trying this in 3.5 results in cubes with notches in corners, an asymmetrical mesh. Turning up the resolution creates a cube with stepped, but rounded corners.
Since selecting a texture, or texture off in the little preview thumbnail on the left panel near the color selector no longer seems to affect whether or not a tool has a texture, what is its purpose?
When I read tutorial docs on the pixologic site they seem to say that GoZ for the PC is now available for ZBrush 3.5. I understand that it is in two parts, the part inside zbrush and the part inside the 3d app. The plugin for Maya and a couple of other programs are also supposed to exist already though, so does that mean that the people who use those apps on PC have those plug-ins already? Or do the plug-ins have to be rewritten to work on the pc versions of those apps?
When modeling with ZSpheres 2, it seems natural to create a musculature for your characters as a way of building them. With bind on, placing a character with musculature in a pose is easy. We want to think that the sketch zspheres are working as a kind of muscle system, and sometimes they seem to. But somehow I don’t think they really are. How are the Zspheres 2 bound to the armature? How does setting the soft bind setting help? If we can be sure that the start of a zsphere 2 stroke will stay relative to the armature bone it is nearest, and the end likewise, then we might, by smoothing it out after posing, be certain to have a muscle that looks correctly stretched or contracted.
To get a bit more complicated, If we have a zsphere armature with a fairly complete musculature and save it to use for various poses, should we have to feel like we must use a unified skin to flesh out the character for finishing each time? We can sculpt, and then create a very favorable topology for this complete armature and musculature, so, does anyone figure there is a good way to bind both the musculature and the finalized mesh so that they can be moved at the same time by the same armature? Can you reproject it onto the musculature?
I’m very excited about the possibilities of GoZ, and am severely curious about what other applications it will be available for. Specifically, how old a version of 3DS Max can I get away with working on? I assume that SOME version of Max will eventually be supported. However, if my legacy version should not be supported I would really hope the people at Pixologic consider supporting Wings 3D, a free modeler which has all of the basic polygon editing tools a person could hope for. Since it is open source you might even think about collaborating with the programmer to integrate it into ZBrush, perhaps as a kind of seperate module, and have a complete and full-strength modeling package that would fill every need.
While I’m wishing I would also really love it if there were a better way of rotating zspheres. Ever since they started coming in two tones I’ve never been able to get the hang of twisting them. When I try they always seem to spin too fast. And if I’m going to use them as an armature I would really love to be able to precisely determine the axis of rotation I’m using at any moment. Knees and elbows can only move on one axis, and I don’t need to be restricted to making such rotations with my viewpoint perpendicular to the axis of rotation. No other app forces me into looking down on an elbow to rotate it, you know. A rotation gizmo like the one you use for rotating objects outside of edit mode would be fantastic.
But again, ZBrush is already pretty fantastic. From old zspheres, with membrane curvature, to new zspheres that I can use to sketch tree roots or musculature, retopology and UV master to take away the most unpleasant aspects of 3D art, this program is worthwhile.