ZBrushCentral

Suggestions for the next version of ZBrush

Hi,

here i post some suggestions for the future version of ZBrush.

Procedural Texture, Displacement and Noise

ZBrush is a texturing software, a feature that he need to have is a procedural texture generator who can be used to texture an entire model and/or create displacement and advance surface noise or used on SpotLight.

And maybe a procedural skin if this is possible. :slight_smile:

Render and lighting effects

Currently we have PaintStop who allow to create drawed guys from a sculpted model. I suggest to add a draw filter in the BPR Filter. Also with the LightCap it’s possible to have cartoon lighting, but need to know how parameters. It will be great to have LightCap preset like FiberMesh preset in the LightBox :

For a sculpting tool it will be great to have cartoon, cell shading effect lighting.

Unbiased render engine for hard surface modeling renders

The BPR render have limits. He have sharpen shadows, when you add sample from a lightcap, you have a lot of shadow on your model. If you try to soft them, the rendering become much longer, longer than a photorealistic render. I suggest to add a photorealistic unbiased render engine (maybe based on GPU + CPU) allow to do fast and photorealistic render. It can be really useful for mecanical rendering on maybe on the future if ZBrush have architectural modeling tool to render interiors. It will replace the export to max, decimation and export maps to render in VRay or iRay. Combine with BPR filter and export filter effect (luminosity, contrast, crop), it will allow to do post prod compositing.

(The sentry gun of Team Fortress 2 that i have made on Maya rendered on Bunkspeed shot (iRay))

Can be good also to render characteres:

Hair and Cloth simulation

The best way to make photorealistic cloths is to have a physics engine who will simulate folds and tears. After that you can DynaMesh it and continue to sculpt on him.
A Hair simulation will be good too to drop down hairs.

Reconstruct Subdiv after DynaMesh

DynaMesh is an awesome tool for sketching, but if you have too many polygons and want to change the overall shape you can’t. You must reduce subdivision and lost details. I suggest to make the Reconstruct Subdiv button work after disable Dynamesh, adjust the shape, come back in highest resolution (not mean high poly) and enable DynaMesh again.

Add mechanical alphas and mecanical shapes for Insert Brushes

Add mecanical alphas, maybe all the alphas and Matcap from the Download Center like the ZPlugin. Add some Insert brushes for mecanical effects (screw, bolts…) and organise all this presets on the LightBox by categories.

Make 3D texts, text on PaintStop and use text on SpotLight to sculpt

Add 3D text. With DynaMesh can be useful sometimes to create base meshes. Do text on PaintStop and export to SpotLight to make signs on hard surface sculpting.

A fast character creation like Poser software

Make a fast character with good proportions on muscles. And after sculpt to customize the character.

Procedural props generator to make rocks, trees, grass, etc. like Disney XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator.

An algorithm to generate props, and sculpt after on it.

Attachments

Procedural Textures.jpg

draw effect.jpg

Sentry.jpg

Maya Apex.jpg

XGen.jpg

I hope they will hear you in the cloth simulation, it seems that you influenced them a lot :smiley:

I think having cloth and hair is taking resources away where it is needed. You can do that stuff in Maya or other host app with or without plugins. If you mean just getting a nice drape, you can do that with nCloth pretty easily. Generating rocks and such might be nice, but again, there are other softwares that can do that stuff and there are many areas that need improvement. If you add too much in ZBrush it will become bloated, probably have more bugs, and run slower. I do agree that substance is very useful and features like that should be available to us to generate all sorts of maps from images, and not just in Zbrush.

I’d like to see the following technical additions for speed, workflow, and render support:

  1. Ptex Support (Mudbox has this already)

  2. Various Subdivisions (smooth UV) schemes supported by Arnold and RenderMan

  3. Texture Painting Resolution independent of poly count (Mudbox has had this for years and not just for Ptex)

  4. 64-bit architecture (I’d like to use all my RAM, this is 2013). This would allow for much higher poly counts.

  5. GPU acceleration (for everything it can be used for)

  6. Global Preference to support “Flipped UVs” by default for all of us Maya users. We shouldn’t need to bother with this anywhere in the app.

  7. Sculpt Tubes on surface without curves for sculpting a new mesh that is snapped to the existing surface (Modo has had this from version 1 I think)

  8. Texture Atlases (a la MARI)