Ryan great art, and hope this new plugin to give you the freedom of creating even more awsome images.
You’re absolutely right about decimation master. It’s a fantastic tool, and you don’t have to deal with disp/normal maps if you want a descent render! I hope that someday any 3d software will come to a level, when you’ll only need to deal with artistic matters and not struggle with all the buttons, the check boxes, the numbers etc.
I agree with ne3g but some people are very happy with all those technical details. Amazing plugin! Thks for share your pipeline 
ryan sir,u r zbrush render had a purely aesthetic and full of life feel to it…which i gues has been lowered by the new render…but thats just me…big fan of your work…and one more question how much do u think does zbrushing and sktching related to each other!!! i mean in precentage!!!
thank u.
I am soooo up for new plug ins that banish the nerd from my workflow…
then again…I like to drive a high powered automatic car while others like a stick shift that they have to keep stopping to tinker with on the journey.
love your work Ryan…
very cool Ryan! DM is looking like a must have! Now I am gonna be up for months trying to figure out how they do it.
Excellent work Ryan 5 stars from me. 
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Ugggnnn!!! That’s the second artist to depress me, by showing how utterly inferior I am to them!!
VERY nice alphas there in the first post and looking forward to watching that Gnomon tutorial.
props my friend!
Great new piece! i love the slight wet-rag striations on the base.(man statue)
However the new plugins and you using MR has me fearful that zbrush’s render engine isn’t getting an upgrade for z4, something unfortunate if true.
nice work
your insights are very well received and they help a lot .
Thank you
Your concept on being lazy at the right places is a great concept.
subscribe indeed.
ministerart - yeah, pretty cool, huh? Can’t wait to get the tutorial out to you guys.
etcher - thanks man.
OlirO- i use a 64 bit OS with 4 gigs of RAM. model was 14 million polys before decimation. 64 bit OS rules!
captain Sensible - Thanks.
aviani1983 - Thanks. Glad you like it.
solidsnakexxx- thanks.
3mm - glad it was useful.
totyo - fantastic job on the plug-in. Paul has shared with me some of the finer points. Congrats!
boblenain - yeah, hear you about animation topo. In that way, I am blessed to be a simple sculptor.
ichiban - I will post the lighting tips in a tutorial from the workshop. due out soonish.
alex oliver - Thanks man. Means alot coming from you.
tokio - much appreciated.
manzarek123 - Glad my work has been useful to you. Thanks for the compliment.
ne3go - ahem!
Pen******* - I agree that some people are happy with the technical stuff and I agree that it is necessary, right now. I am just happy that there are choices out there for those who don’t want to or don’t have time to learn all the technical stuff.
neozerahan - I’m a big fan of ZBrush’s render too.
vedanta - thanks.
aminuts - it is a must-have and its free!
Baron_3D - Thanks. much appreciated.
dustbin - Glad the alphas are useful. I hear your pain. I feel it everyday!
spaceboy - what?! I wouldn’t worry. They likely have things in store for us all!
Walt-Art - Thanks for the kind words. It was a lesson I learned when 8 years old and I was doing all the chores while my brothers slacked off. It has served me well.
awesome, I appreciate it can’t wait
Ryan, do you have any plans to update your zbrush 3 DVD to include the latest from Zbrush 4 ,when it comes out? Maybe some advanced magic ?
If so, any time frame?
Really enjoyed the sample video from your zbrush 3 DVD.
Cheers
Impressive work as always Ryan. Thanks for the stitch alphas as well. I’m sure I will be using these a lot.
great model… Nice work…
well guys decimation techniques have always existed, there is a free software called meshlab tht does it pretty well but there’s an advantage on doing it in ZB is more streamline… The biggest advantage is in the normalsmaps I think… decimation techniques + xnormal = crazyness!
anyone who had to deal with scandata knows what I’m talking about
it’s nothing new, just better
S
Very interesting information. I was unaware of any other decimation techniques other than optimizing and such in other apps. Decimation Master seems to focus on keeping the detail, as well as optimizing.
Once you use decimation master your UVs are thrown out the window right?
I am curious to why some one would use normal maps after decimation master since the normal info is already there? And if UV’s are gone, it requires doing them over again to use xnormal and get normal and displacement maps.
I may have miss-interpreted your post. Do you mean that decimation master makes it easier to generate normal maps onto your low res model, by allowing you to take it into another app like Max or Maya since there is less geometry?
I apologize if I totally miss-understood.
I extensively use decimation for the following:
- Resurfacing in maya using NEX from the cheesy parametric basemodel for maquette creation (AKA stickfigure basemesh) to the final thought out nice topology model. I found very simple topology is way better way to sculpt, keeps it looser and u dont have to deal with localized topological density as in the looped regions.
- the power if being able to compress a 200 mil model in less than 1 million is huge, of course we are talking of the highres target, nevertheless i had once to model this square with lots of statues and I had no time to resurface them and they were static so i decimated them down to 3000 and get all of the details back through a simple uv mapping and normals.
to Ryan, I think u can push tht decimation even further, u have very little high freq details on it is very smooth brolly u could get it right around 10000 to 50000 without loosing much…
I love decimation once I had to reduce a whole environment for the last Mummy film and I went from something crazy like 300mil polys to 2or 3 without loosing much…
Another handy thing, If u have a super heavy model and zb crashes just split it, select boundary preserve and then stitch it back together with import add and merge, it works great… eventually dec Master goes faster too… u still have the pain to have to export everything and reimport it again but seriously tht’s not a big deal!
so cool and so sexy~
Wow Ryan! Just beathtaking! I hope you will doing a Render-Tutorial related to your realistic sculpts Very nice. Hope I will be reaching this konwledge and realisim one day