Zed thank you Jesus you are a saint
I also want a way you can zoom in as close to the model as possible fingernails are not 5 feet away. Great app but the texturing method is trivial. you export it into Maya and you have to create textures by mapping uv’s Got the Gnomon Zbrush Production Pipeline video’s 1 & 2. Had a headache by the end of the 1st one took notes on the second but its all confusing you have to Shift-Ctrl select an area make it a layer. then when you go into zmapping mode it tells you how to do it then you do it and it refuses… Seems like PS intertwined with a woman…
Why isn’t anybody talking about voxels?
I guess they never tried 3d-coat, voxel sculpting is so much better than poly sculpting that it’s a pain to go back to ZB after o played around with it for a while.
Another think in 3d-coat that puts ZB to shame are the retopo tools. Currently, I use 3d-coat to design, ZB to paint, then 3d-coat again to retopologise. It would be great if ZBrush had this extra features.
We’re not talking about voxel (at least I’m not) because they require a beast of a system to get the most out of them. I have a beast of a system but I can work on Zbrush on an old pentium 4 system I have hooked up to my TV as a media player. Voxels are great for some things, and horrible at others. Try to get the crack in a man’s ass to work correctly with voxels…you can’t do it. It’s just the nature of voxels. Now 3dCoat’s retopo tools are amazing (I prefer Modo) but 6 of 1 half a dozen…
Also when you’re thinking about software do you really want to have to buy 3dCoat and Zbrush when you can get the same results from both? I mean, I can spend $1500 and get modo and Zbrush. Or I can spend $1100 and get 2 sculpting apps that do basically the same thing. The reason I mention Zbrush is because Zbrush and Modo talk directly to one another. Modo for UV’s, textures WITH LAYERS!!! Great retopo tools and a very unique workflow that is amazing. Their render is taking shape very nicely as well. Now that they have fur…soon to have character animation, then you add a physics engine and it will be a full package. If you don’t need physics in the system than you’re all set. Everything you need for video game work is already inside of Modo (minus the character stuff at the moment). And the software is under $1k.
So, if you’re thinking bottom line you’ve got $2200 (including Photoshop) and you’ve got a complete working system for the work that I need to have done and the pipeline between those 3 apps in amazing in every sense of the word.
Now if you throw 3d coat into the mix you add another $500+ to be used solely for the purpose that voxels are great base starters and it has the very similar tools to Modo’s retopo tools. But you also have to take into account that you now need a beast system again to handle the voxels that you’re working with…so that ups my bottom line with the addition of a decent GPU, more RAM, a CPU that can handle all of that…you see where I am going with this. In regards to Modo, Zbrush, and PS those apps can run on POS computer that I have lying around that is over 8 years old.
Ehh…I’m not bashing 3d Coat by any means, I’m just thinking bottom line. I guess the business man in me comes out every now and again.
I think of voxels like ZSpheres - a cool way to create base meshes. That said, you can sculpt a fair amount of detail w/ voxels alone, but people don’t do hi frequency detail w/ voxels in 3dc. They do it through image maps after retopologizing the voxels into polygons. Which works good, but you still end up with the same limitations as polys w/ image maps. At that point, I like ZBrush.
I’ve messed around with 3d Coat some. I’m still on the demo. Voxels are an extremely neat way to rough out an idea because they are freely additive and subtractive. But for me, ZBrush (and modo as well) is where I suspect I will do most of the work. There’s a lot of neat tools in there that can spark some creativity though, which is what it’s all about. Definitely an interesting addition to the tool set.
I also agree that modo’s retopo tools are pretty sweet. In fact, the entire software is incredibly cool and works great with ZBrush.
Actually, 3d coat is only $285. PLUS, they send you a coupon good for thirty days that drops the price to $235!
If it were $500+, I wouldn’t have bothered because I already have ZBrush, even though it’s a cool app. However, that’s a price point that makes it worth getting as a compliment to ZBrush and modo for me.
Oast666,
But that’s exactly my point. I don’t own a 3d coat license either, (I’ve been using it at work for the last couple of months) precisely because it would be a waste of money, thats why I would like Zbrush to support voxels . Actually Zbrush + Modo + Photoshop is my pipeline of choice, and I wouldn’t like to change it. But voxels have some flexibilities that polygons will never match (although GoZ for Modo is probably going to get close).
As for the limitations you mentioned, they are basically due to the fact that developers don’t know how to use voxels’ full capabilities yet. Take a look at this experimental software called Fiber Mesh for instance, that’s something that could easily be implemented for 3d coat (or Zbrush, if it worked with voxels), or better yet, we could sketch a cage for manipulation on top of the geometry and use it to move point, surfaces and edges around like conventional box modeling, but with many obvious advantages.
And I don’t agree that voxels are that slow. I’ve been running 3d coat on a Pentium IV 3.0 GHz with 2GB of RAM and working with voxels in it is as smooth as sculpting a 1 million poly mesh in Zbrush running on the same machine. And remember, 3d coat is being developed by a single guy.
I really think that voxels are the way to go, they have the potential to give us the best of all worlds (conventional modeling, sculpting, CAD and NURBS).
That depends on the detail you are sculpting then. Voxels just aren’t comparable to ZBrush polys in the sense of speed, smoothness, or detail. They’re only advantage is the freedom of no topology, but come on, they’re not as smooth as sculpting in ZBrush. Not even close.
I’m running 3dc on a pretty fast 8 core Mac Pro w/ 4 gigs. Even on this machine, voxels can’t compete. In contrast, polys can’t compete with the creative freedom of no topology contstraints. So I’m just finding fun ways to combine them! 
I just started learning zbrush, and I can’t put into words how retarded it is to zoom in/out in this app! Hold alt, pan and let go out and move mouse?!
I could live with it, if you could change it… but you can’t, can you? oh well…
I felt the same way, but it becomes so second nature and you will not want to change it. It is really an efficient way to navigate with a wacom pen, just stick with it and your brain will adjust.
That’s what a few ZB users told me already… you’ll hate it the first few weeks then you’ll get used to it. but still… I wonder why we can’t change it?!
It’s like they want to make us use those keys, and nothing else.
You do realize that 3.5 now has an alternative navigation option right?
Right mouse button to rotate.
Right mouse + CTRL to Zoom.
Right mouse + Alt to Pan.
Thankfully they left the original navigation alone for those of us who prefer it
Oh? Really?
How do you do that?
Of course, I realize there’s many people already used to those original hotkeys, but they could / should let the user customize to his will.
Like I said, use the right mouse button with those keys. You don’t have to turn anything on or off. Not sure if it is exactly the same in 3.2 for macs (I think it is).
After using Zbrush for 6 years all other programs navigation seems retarded here.
An intuitive hotkey editor(with methods of organization via filters and profiles) needs to be implemented so that EVERYTHING can be quickly and easily hotkeyed to both the keyboard and mouse… and I’ll even go as far as to say midi controller support as well so that I can control any thing that takes a floating point value with a slider or knob at the drop of a dime. (The Korg nanoKontrol would be an affordable solution…)
Truth be told, it wasn’t until I started hotkeying everything in all of the apps. that I use did I begin to see some tremendous speed increases in my productivity… (Thanks to my Belkin N52te )
All in all, make Zbrush 4 completely customizable so that all artists from all walks of life can completely tailor it to their needs.
Ah. I misread the discount. I thought that said with a $235 discount…my bad. And I agree, at 300 it could be used as an addition to the pipeline.
3.1 > 3.5.
Thanks a bunch!
Tested it, works fine! Much, much, much better!
Zoom is still retarded, but I can always isolate the piece of geometry I’m working on. And if I still need to use zoom, i could always use the “scale” button on the right of the viewport. even though it has a strange name.
Even naming conventions are weird on this program, calling zoom tool scale tool, calling a 3d mesh a tool, damn… :rolleyes:
Awesome!
Yeah, I have all of the menus hotkeyed to the thumb stick. Alt, Ctrl, and Shift are assigned to 01, 06, and 11. The scroll wheel is assigned to undo, redo, higher res, lower res, increase draw size, decrease draw size, etc. And the rest of the buttons are assigned to my most commonly used elements. 
Food for thought, you can assign up to 8 hotkeys per key if one were so inclined…
EG:
Key| Modifyer
q |
q | CTRL
q | ALT
q | CTRL+ALT
Q | SHIFT
Q | SHIFT+CTRL
Q | SHIFT+ALT
Q | SHIFT+CTRL+ALT
So that would give you, 144 keybinds per profile which in total would give you 432 possible keybinds…I mean, the way I have my n52te configured it would.
That’s more than enough ergonomic keybinding for me!
It’s different but it makes sense if you think about it. Everything you do is done upon a canvas. So when you use the zoom tool, you’re actually zooming the canvas in and not an object. While the scale tool, sets how big an object is on the canvas. 
Closer to $200 w/ the discount!
If I had to pick one, ZBrush would be a no brainer, but having both is fun! There’s some strange tools in that program.
I like the retopo. You can do a low poly retopo quickly, then subdivide it a bunch. As you divide, it vacuums to the voxels pulling out the shape. Good for my kind of fairly dense base meshes. Since I only like mid res voxel sculpting, it captures the form.
You can of course use maps to get lots of voxel detail, and even sculpt hi res maps onto the retopo’d mesh. However, I prefer doing the details and generating maps in ZBrush.
Can’t wait to get my paws on ZSpheres II for the Mac! Then it’ll be free form heaven!