Just left the Pixologic stream.
ZBrush 2018 will be released tomorrow, March 28th. And…
Sculptris live tessellation will finally be integrated into ZBrush!
And dozens of other features.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?211690-ZBrush-2018-Arrives-on-March-28&p=1229577#post1229577
So is the idea of Zbrush 5 dead? I remember hearing that Zbrush 5 was supposed to be a much needed refactoring of the Zbrush UI and workflow. These new features are great, but they’ve in effect added even more menus/clutter to an already extremely busy and unintuitive UI. Plus I’ve lost count of how many different modeling workflows now exist in Zbrush. 7? 8?
The biggest complaint that I keep hearing from production modelers in regards to Zbrush is how everything in Zbrush feels like a “trick” which needs to be committed to memory. What this package needs is one unified workflow. That and some competition, though Autodesk saw to it that it wouldn’t have any by effectively killing off Mudbox.
Autodesk is allegedly committing new resources to Mudbox development. Product managers on the AD forums have claimed that a new version is in the works. I’ll be watching with a skeptical, raised eyebrow.
It would be too little too late at this stage of the game. There was a point where Mudbox and Zbrush had parity with one another, and maybe Mudbox was even more popular for a time. I don’t think that there’s anything that Autodesk can do to get Mudbox back to that level of user adoption and enthusiasm.
I’m actually shocked at how many artists still use Mudbox in production. It doesn’t have to compete with Zbrush outside of vfx/animation pipelines. Forget the mass market, just focus on pipeline stuff. It still may have a pulse.
It would be great to see some kind of revival, in that case. I work mainly in feature animation and I’ve only ever seen Zbrush, Maya, and Modo used within the context of productions.
Yeah I think its more shot work, cause you can import cameras into Mudbox. Also, you don’t have to switch over to your windows box. I personally use Zbrush, but if Mudbox improved their brushes I would use it more.
Actually my feelings. Almost each tool has its own interface. There’s no really much logic in brushes placement, or where you have to import the texture (there are several places).
When watching presentation, I imagined a beginner artist, who will have to learn all those ways to model, which increase the complexity of just one program. Add to this 5-10 more needed programs. Zbrush is an amazing software, and irreplaceable. But its UI is really getting more and more complex.
damn just when i thought they’d work on their UI…
another load of tools on top of tools… this software becoming a huge mess without some cleaning up.
Lol, I knew someone was going to bring up ZB 5 as though that means anything anymore. The only feature ever touted for ZB5 was 64-bit and that was delivered in 4r7.
That’s downplaying it a bit isn’t it. Finally getting Sculptris in ZB proper is such a huge addition. One we’ve been waiting for since Pixo bought Sculptris. It’s as big a game changer as subtools or dynamesh.
IMO, the main cause of the UI bloat is the fact that ZB still supports everything it ever supported. The 2.5D tools are still there though less prominent than they were in v2. However, a lot of those tools have been supplanted by a better system. ZSpheres-> ZSketch-> Dynamesh-> Sculptris Pro. ZSpheres are still very useful but who uses ZSketch anymore. It was the precursor to Dynamesh and I feel Dynamesh will be replaced by Sculptris Pro. Actually, just from the demo yesterday I have a feeling Sculptris will make a lot of existing workflows irrelevant. One click to activate and you don’t have to worry about geometry while sculpting anymore. And it appears to work exactly like the other tools just with different colored rings.
PolyGroupIT looks like another precursor tool. Much like Decimation Master was a separate window before it got integrated and simplified in the main interface.
The UI alone has kept me away, and kept Mudbox in my pipeline even though Autodesk has done almost nothing to it since 2014. I’d love to learn Zbrush’s tools but the clutter and insanity involved is just daunting, and I’ve tried it every year since it first emerged. In Zbrush I get stuck almost immediately. In Mud, I get stuff done. With Maya obviously as the main engine.
But every time I mention a UI change in Z, people just call me lazy. And they’re probably right! Nice to see some others agree, though.
In 2014 I finally sat down and made myself learn Zbrush hard surface sculpting after many failed false starts. Now I use it for most of my modeling.
It is the most tricky UI and it is not really like the other 3d applications. I can model in Softimage, Maya, and Modo with the same level of competence as they all have the tools required to follow Vitaly Bulgarov’s Gnomon disc in Softimage.
Zbrush has many little gotchas. They are specific. They are like little english lanquage exceptions where a rule is used except for those twelve exceptions per usage case.
After fighting with it for hard surface I finally had the ah hah moment and all the different workflows lined up like that scene in the Dark Crystal when the three suns meet and beams into the eyes and all the different parts made sense as a whole. BUT… it was a bit of a battle.
Mudbox could easily be more relevant if it had a hard surface workflow like Zbrush and then added a way to do a zremesher type or retopo that is based on curves or previous brush stroke history.
As of now the only part I lament in Zbrush is retopo time when getting what I want from Zremesher isn’t going to cut it. One time I must have run Z remesher using Zremesher guides about 20 times with different settings before it actually did something close to what I wanted.
IF mudbox or Zbrush came up with a preview/interactive slider showing a guesstimate of the general polyscale and flow results you were going to get while you were playing with sliders it would be immensely helpful. I often use polygroups and zresher curves stroke by polygroup edges and do decent. But its the last little hangup in my hard surface workflow.
We just revived our Mudbox subs. Haven’t tried Z2018 yet, but we ran into major issues with Windows 10 and the previous version of Zbrush. So much so that we had to give up on it as pretty much nothing worked. Even the normally amazing support team from Pixo essentially said “Sorry”.
Hopefully 2018 fixes our issues …
Has anyone had a problem with ZBrush 2018?
Specifically, Im on a Mac and get a file write error when trying to click on a reference view (front, back, etc) in the texture palette, or store a view, or load image in the image plane. And yes, I have a legal installation. I submitted a ticket with Pixologics tech support and they replied it could be a permissions problem with two folders. I followed their instructions but it didnt fix the problem. A google search shows that one other possible cause of the error message is the path of ZBrushs scratch disk, but that checks out as well.
Ive tried re-installing, even downloaded it again, but no dice. Luckily, I did not delete 4R8, so I can survive with a workaround, but the fact that 4R8 works fine adds a little more mystery to what could be wrong with my installation of 2018.
My hope is there is some kind of bug which will get fixed in the next release.
Looks like Mudbox 2018.2 has added a form of dynamic tessellation…Nifty!
https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/thebuzz/announcing-mudbox-20182-update-and-introducing-dynamic-tessellation/