bLawless thanks for posting info!
Can you give more info on the following?
- What do PUV tiles look like?
- How does the multiple textures per tool work?
- What do the AO masking/maps look like?
- How does the new navigation feel? Is it like Maya?
i’ll second those, heh
if you dont mind 
****ing amen to that !
[QUOTE=–E--]bLawless thanks for posting info!
Sorry I can’t answer any of those questions, I know very little about texture/uv mapping, and a use Maya only a little bit. But the f key does work a little like maya, like the A key and F key, frame all or frame the selection. In 3.12 you hit f once and it frames the entire visible ztool. When you hit f a second time, it frames the active subtool.
Yea, in ZB3.1 you can paint directly on the texture in projection master.
Hey, thanx for the input! I can’t wait! Maybe I’ll bump it up to 16 soon if the Snow Leopard/ZB 3.5 combo can use more than 4! Hell, maybe I’ll just do it anyways!
From what I heard most is that the biggest problems arose from upgrading to Leopard, rather than buying a fresh new Mac and still having problems (though there still were).
I would hope that by now most probs are fixed, which is why I’ve been thinking about finally upgrading.
I never upgrade on release night, and in Leopard’s case, hearing so many “horror stories” I decided to wait much longer. Sure I may have waited longer than I had to, but I didn’t really see many enhancments that I needed justifying the extra processing power and ram needed just to run Leopard.
Jamespthornton - Adobe CS3 came out long before Leopard… so there’s no way it said it was only compatible with leopard… maybe you misunderstood that is was simply compatible with leopard (in addition to 10.3, .4) since that was a concern at the time. I’ve been running CS3 for over a year on 10.4 without a problem. I appreciate you saying that the kinks have been ironed out at this point, and I think that’s the point I should be making.
mistafreeze - What you’re saying really worries me. I have a Mac Mini with a max of 3GB, and you’re saying that there’s a huge difference between 2GB and 8GB… so I wonder if i’m actually going to be gettig worse performance by upgrading to 10.5.
“firefox loads websites instantaneously, application windows pop open at my command, very few freeze ups (none so far), and everything is 100x better.” that should be how any system works from the start!!! 
goldleaf - What’s your setup running Leopard?
Bottom line is I shouldn’t have to worry so much about upgrading a MAC.
hello friends,
hmm, can’t find any link to download the apple zbrush trial ?
thx for the link
I have a Mac Pro, Dual 2.66GhzDC w/ 5GB Ram.
Although you’ll be able to use ZBrush on your mini, it’s not very ‘future-proof’ in terms of ram ceiling and CPU upgrades.
Just my 2 cents on a mac, while it doesn’t have Apple’s blessing, it’s totally possible to upgrade the CPUs of a Mac Pro. The First Gen. Mac Pros (like mine) will run with Quad Xeons (anandtech has an article), and though the specs don’t say it, I believe these Mac Pros ought to support at least 32GB ram (they said 16gb max because 4gb sticks weren’t really prevelant/affordable in 2006 when the Mac Pro was first released).
Look around on craigslist, or the Apple refurb/clearance list, and save up, as it’s worth it in the long run in terms of upgrading parts as you need/can afford to.
*The Mac trial won’t be released until after the customers have received what they paid for.
Well there is a diff between 2 and 8 if you’re running 64 bit. Zbrush will only see 2 on your mini. You have room for 10.5.
[edit: oh yeah, i do recommend getting something better when you can 
]
I thought i should write here about my first impressions of 3.12.
I am using it on a macbook pro with 2gb ram.
I made a test of where i took one of the default models and i subdivided it to 14 million and started to paint. what seems really cool about this release of zbrush is that it almost has a constant working speed. what i mean by this is that even if my model is 3 million, or 6, or 14… the working speed barely drops. the only tool that you might notice it on is the smooth tool, but otherwise its spankin fast for what its doing.
hiding elements is MUCH faster than it was in 3.1 its useful again.
zooming now works to infinite amounts, i like this.
shadows are a lot more useful now because they dont cover up your model entirely but rather shade it darker, but still in a useful range so that you can sculpt in the area and see what you are getting.
brush now moves over the surface.
making displacement maps is MUCH improved because now we dont need to go through hoops to apply a displacement map anymore. we dont need an alpha and texture to displace, or need to worry about smoothing amounts in the display properties. now the process is simply knowing your displace distance, and apply a displacement texture to the tool. you can press apply, turn the preview on or off at any time. and its fast.
you can now use right click on any part of the model to tumble the model around. the old navigation still works, but the new one makes tumbling easier.
i also made a test for polypaint transfer to texture. as long as you got a high rez map, when i compared the result i had in polypaint, and the generated texture transfer, my results were identical. i couldnt tell the difference.
it also seems like theres a real perspective finally. when you move the camera around the model distorts as it should. the only thing that is still not true to perspective is that when you zoom into the model, you are still merely scaling the canvas so to speak. its got that same old zooming perspective feel, where the perspective doesnt change. its still a nice upgrade however. regardless if zoom distorts or not, the fact that we can zoom infinitely, and tumble anytime without having to reach for buttons is a very welcome change. for people that used the old zbrush, the old navigation is still perfectly usable.
overall from what ive tested in the hour that ive had it for, it seems like a VERY stable release. i pushed zbrush to where it thought it would die crawling and it kept going. i got a few times where it had to compact memory, but with 2gb ram that is normal, and once zbrush had done with compacting, i was back to blazing speed. 
its all good, and a very worthy upgrade. sure makes me wish it was on windows, because i just got a quad core machine with 8gb ram haha.!
Thanks a ton for posting your thoughts Martin, they are very much appreciated. 
Can you tell us your thoughts on the mentioned AO masking/maps, multiple textures per tool and the new PUV layout?
I can’t wait for this on the PC.
What about ZMapper guys ? is there still a way to generate normal maps ?
I have to get to bed now sorry man. im sure someone will come along and answer soon enough. I just opened it recently so im not sure fully caught up with whats new, and how things work yet.
the general impression is that pixologic really wants this application to be the best it can be. on this machine i never used to go past 6 million with zbrush 3.1 on windows. now i just made a test with 18 and it seemed even faster ( with symmetry turned on ). again at 18 mil, compacting takes a bit, but once its done, things zoom along at the same speed that you were going at when you only had 1 million polys. ( remember when that used to be a big deal? )
that on its own is an awesome sign of things to come.
I will test the texture stuff when i wake up :). if nobody mentions anything by the time i wake up, then i will report back.
wow I’m so excited to get 3.12!!!
Yeah I know, I wasn’t into 3D stuff that much, and the Mini was able to do 4 foot by 6 foot posters for work, so it’s been fine. But yeah, I’m doing a lot of Modo lately, and really want to get into Zbrush (again) so… I agree, a Mac Pro is in my future!! Maybe a refresh this Jan at Macworld?
No milk today. 
Downloaded! (@ 500Ko/s)
I’m soooo exited!
Love you guys
Lucky to everybody has the upgrade!!!
Thanks for the reports on the new release. My best wishes to everybody with the new MAc, and can wait to beging to see the news models working on it.
All the best, Arturo
one quick question : are you finally able to delete / remove tools from the tool palette ?