What i would like is see is the ability to have seperate alphas for texturing (polypainting) and dissplacement (sculpting).
Curently, if you use an alpha for sculpting and a texture for painting, that alpha will also affect the amount (trasparency) of your painting, something that sometimes you may not want. This is a big problem.
I would really like to be able to set different alphas for the displacement and the (opacity) of the painting (texture).
Haha, it’s fun to dream about ZBrush 4. Although I have to say that I’m still pretty happy with the current version. But there’s always room for improvement, so what could that look like…
1. Improved Unified Skin/Automatic Retopo
Some pages ago there was talk about getting rid of polygons. I totally agree that it would be cool if we would not have to worry about stretched polys in the future. Being able to easily add substance to or to break holes into a sculpture would really enhance the sculpting experience. But thinking about the importance of the subdivided polygon paradigm (just try to think about texturing, texture baking and that stuff WITHOUT polygons. And a lot ZBrush scultpings are created for animated models and think about THOSE without polygons…) I don’t see how this could be done so easily. However, I don’t even think that we have to get rid of polygons we just have to get them into the right places. 
The Unified Skin funktion is quite powerful allready. Perhaps it could be combined with the retopo features. I could imagine an Automatic Retopo tool, which covers the sculpting with an Unified Skin which then could be manipulated with brush features like “paint edge flow direction” or “raise poly density”. You would ZBrush let do the main workload and just enhance details where the human brain is still better then a computer. That would be cool!
2. Boolean/Slice Tools
Merging Subtools and automatically getting rid of internal polygons, cutting windows into walls, taking away parts of a model by slicing it up (producing nice and clean cross sections) - these are features I really miss in ZBrush.
3. Texture Channels/Layers
It would be totally cool to be able to draw texture channels like transparency, incandescence, specular power, cosine power and so on and to be able to preview them in the viewport. Being able to paint these channels each in several layers would be the icing on the cake.
4. Masking
Ok, masking works quite fine allready but I would like to be able to save several masks and growing/shrinking would be a usefull addition, too.
I numbered those points in the order of importance to me. But feel free, Pixologic, to develop these features in any order that pleases you! As long as you develop them, of course! 
Z4 for Mac released in the same time of Z4 for Win.
No more… 
Automatic Retopo with some menu slider options sounds reasonable to me.
As far as getting rid of polygons while sculpting, that was me that brought it up. My theory is that, with polygon free digital clay, the sculpting of forms would be totally free. Imagine being able to create any shape, wide or thin, big or small, short or long, all from a sphere without worrying about topology. Combine that with the use of subtools, extractions, layers, etc and your talking real artistic freedom. So then the question naturally comes up, how could that work in the 3d production world that relies on polygons? There would have to be a function, also with menu slider options, that could translate digital clay sculptures into polygons with correct topology and multiple subdivisions. Again, I don’t think this is out of reach for current technology. In fact, there are 3d apps that use what they call true geometry, which is polygon free, such as Groboto and I think 3d coat. Groboto can export the geometry as polygon obj’s, so it has to be the future of digital sculpting at some point. Just my two pennies I guess…
I don’t think that will be a problem for this version or future versions. We may very well be the last of the Mac users that will ever have to wait months and months for a release that’s already out on PC.
Some ability to lock down/prevent movement of vertices composing the centerline edgeloop from their positions in the middle, maybe? I’d really like that. A lot.
I think feature to export HD sculpting will be great…
Layers for textures would be AWESOME!!!
I like all the suggestions, but the simplest one I want is:
The ability to call up another viewport.
I’m a traditional sculptor, and I almost never sculpt what’s directly in front of me. I work on the profiles first, so ideally I’d like to be working 90 degrees off of where the sculpting tools work best. If I could sculpt in one window and see the changes in the other view it would save a lot of time.
Nice call! I have a dual monitor set up and that would be great. Sometimes it’s hard to gauge how much your affecting a surface without seeing it from the side.
Tip: The inflate brush, unlike the standard brush, sculpts perpendicular to the mesh. So if you are sculpting the side of a face while looking directly at the front of the face,…it affects the mesh as the standard would if you were looking directly at the side of the face (whew, I know). The standard pushes or pulls straight in the direction you are viewing, with no regards to the contours of the mesh. The inflate changes with the mesh.
This is why the inflate brush has become one of my personal favorites, you can sculpt from the side and see the altering of the shape easier. Plus it respects the contour of the actual mesh, which looks more natural in most cases.
Thanks for the tip James, I’ll give it a try!
1.basically a zbrush tool ‘loader’ for 3dsmax, xsi, lightwave etc etc would do it for me!
in the host app you’d get the option to dial up and down the res [detail] for the viewport
from the actual zbrush tool [not an obj] and have a render detail too…the impoted/linked tool would automatically create the displacement, normal map and bump from the tool loader.
the tool loader wouldn’t have access to ALL of what zbrush can do just basically have mesh detail level for viewport and render plus all the maps automattically set up…in zbrush you’d export as host ztool and select a destination app such as 3dsmax, xsi etc
i thinking that mudbox will eventually go this route and so zbrush should be heading that way too…now i;m not sure if pixologic have an sdk for other coders to create scripts/plugins for ztiools but it shoudl be high on the to do list if they want to remain ahead of their competing apps
playing nice with other apps and making using your zbrush models in them is quite important i reckon.
The ability to create objects using Polygon Planes with control options like edge, vertex, face, object mode. With merge, extrude, split, break, scale, mirror geometry, and add final polygon thickness level.
This way we can make complex hard surface models like we could in other 3d modeling packages.
I’d like a “draw on” topology menu like Silo, but better as a second option. I have an idea for a retopo tool to build new topology quicker.
A 2d topo evenly spaced grid image that you can airbrush over your original model to make new topo. You can rotate this 2d image plane around to whatever angle you want those lines to follow before airbrushing it down. You can make your own line flow designs and save them and reuse them as 2d Topoplanes as well. Think of the default one like a 2d grid image comprised of perfectly spaced lines. You move it over the model, rotate it (if you need to) to match the line flow, and then you set it down. Now a 2d image view port pops up and you can move, add, delete, and create new lines with movable vertex, edge, face option features. Lets say your going about your edit 2d plane topo mesh in Edge mode. You click on any edge selected in this 2d topgrid view and at the same time you see were that edge you selected is on the model (it turns red). You can move it if you want or split it. Or you can delete it and then insert a vertex into the edge line above it and join the new edge vertexes to another edge. This airbrushed topo grid on the 3d model instantly changes to match whatever changes you make in this viewport.
Maybe I’ll make an image to explain it later.
I think it could be faster, and models that are not perfectly symmetrical could take less time to retopo using this trick.
Lastly, I hate starfish/5 pointed star polygons issues. Is there a way to have a smart retopo feature that detects this and automatically corrects the topo in that area? That would be cool.
This one seems rather simple, and I’m surprised it doesn’t have it-- the ability to adjust the Hide Unmasked threshold which is currently fixed at 50%.
There are workarounds, but are muti step-- if you use grayscale masks and Hide Unmasked /Delete Hidden to edit your geometry (or extract mesh), but don’t always want to cut up the geometry at 50% mask level, you have to export to an alpha, tweak the alpha curve to compensate & then mask from alpha. I suppose this may be a job for a ZScript, but it would be so much cleaner to select “HidePt” and then adjust an associated slider to find the right spot by observing the model go in and out of visibility as you adjust. Maybe there’s a better workaround but I haven’t found it yet…
And a smarter “spray” in 2.5D-- right now spray uses the orientation of the pixol under the mouse when you click for a spray, when I’d rather it used the orientation of the pixol under the centerpoint of each individual element being sprayed. As if each sprayed element was placed individually by mouse click over the canvas pixols, rather than its current behavior. I like to do some Jackson Pollock-ish stuff with spray over a jumbled background, but it isn’t quite as random as I’d like since each sprayed group of elements (per single click or drag) are all oriented alike even though they may be sprayed over a wide area (depending on .spray placement slider).
I use 2.5D a lot, and have found very little new there in ZB3.1 over ZB2 (and MUCH slower rendering, to boot, like 10x slower on the same machine-- a dual core 3GHZ/2GRAM). I hope it’s only because the new 3D stuff was more crucial and new updated 2.5D features are in the works for ZB3.5.
–
Sync
colour code the brush pallete icons so they are not vague ALL grey blobs when you open it up…mainly colour the most needed…move brush, smooth brush, standard brush and clay brush…just give the whole dran thing something other than ALL grey…maybe slate blue for smooth brush, red for move and a clay color for clay…you get the idea!
a relax brush to relax a model without changing the shape
The ability to create objects using Polygon Planes with control options like edge, vertex, face, object mode. With merge, extrude, split, break, scale, mirror geometry, and add final polygon thickness level.
-It’s Alive
-Also to display and export multiple textures as in one texture per subtool. And a simple all-in-one export option which makes it simple to export textures & normal maps to animation programs like Max and Maya.
Hey Pixoguys ) Please add AUTO-RETOPOLOGY TOOL and such function as polygon reducer (aja VizUp tech)
I’ve been using the open source QSlim program for polygon reduction, I agree it would be great if something like it were integrated into ZBrush, though perhaps a script could be created that would call qslim ala-Zapplink? Export obj, invoke qslim, import obj, etc… I have found however, that qslim is a little finicky, and it uses an obscure fileformat. I’ve been using ivcon to translate back and forth but found that it has problems depending on filesize. I have one executable that works with smaller files, but blows up with larger ones, and another executable that works fine with large files but I seem to recall had an issue with smaller ones, so at the moment it’s not an easily automatable process…
–
Sync
for zbrush 4 i’d like a standard gizmo [like maya, 3dsmax] move tool for positioning subtools, rotating and scaling them
thank you!