Zbrush 3.5 & Maya!

Guess what ladies and gents? Zbrush 3.5 is bringing the GoZ functionality to Zbrush for windows users as well as a crapload of awesome new features! Supposed to come out in the next week...

Though I think GoZ will be the most popular feature allowing you to seamlessly transfer projects between maya and zbrush and maintain the object detail, textures, bumps, and UV maps.

I think this is going to end up making Zbrush a very very popular creation tool for sculpties, but I could be wrong >.>

Is anyone else as excited about this as I am?

Very cool! But unfortunately it's probably not going to be of much use for sculpties with Maya. Remember, the scupty exporter for Maya is set up for NURBS. It doesn't work terribly well with polygons. Zbrush can't use NURBS at all.

(Money's still on the table, by the way, for any programmers out there who may be reading this, to add polygon functionality to the exporter. IM me in-world if you want the job.)

For what it's worth, I hope Autodesk will jump on the bandwagon here, and incorporate a similar live two-way communication paradigm into Mudbox. There are many ways in which Mudbox is far superior to Zbrush, in my opinion, but in terms of shear number of features, Zbrush is still in the lead. GoZ makes for a rather glaring example.

Will definitely be interesting to see. So far the pipeline between programs is somewhat stunted when it comes to sculpties. 2k Suisei's Zsculpty and Sculpty Maker for Zbrush users has really made things a lot easier. The downfall is that you can't use sculpty meshes from other modellers that have been exported to OBJ. I love Zapplink for Zbrush to Photoshop, but I'd like to see some kind of portability between say Blender and Zbrush et al when it comes to meshes intended for sculpties. Maybe I'm just missing the proper attack and sculpt map baker ...not sure.

Chosen, I definitely agree with you on Mudbox being superior in some aspects to Zbrush. Intuitive, easy to handle, and configurable, I liked it from the start.

GoZ is supposed to be enabled for Modo and Cinema4d as well...OMG ...WANT ...NOW!

I've played with mudbox, I found it clunky in a lot of ways and with how they changed up zbrush in 3.5 I think it will blow away mudbox tenfold.

The noise tool to create object noise in various ways even use it to create textures via poly painting is amazing. The planar tools for creating hard edges, and a number of other toys just make it... drool lol.

Mudbox, for me, was slow. There was a noticeable lag between brush stroke and actual application. I don't get that at all with Zbrush. The texturing tools, and the ability to create a skeleton for your object then paint your mesh ontop of it, then move it around like an avatar in poser while you're sculpting... genius. There's a lot of applications for it, and if you watch some of the new vids on the zclassroom on pixologics page you will see what I mean.

It's out now btw.

Not to mention when SL Supports full on polymeshes... Being able to hop back and forth with Zbrush and Maya... it's gonna be amazing the things people can come up with. Maya is great for a lot of things but when you see the amount of detail you can add in zbrush with a few clicks of a mouse and a slider... you will be amazed at what they're doing and the results you can get between the two.

That and.. Zbrush releases their updates for free where as Autodesk charges somewhere in the range of 800$ for them?

The latest version of Primstar development adds .obj to it's import sculptie feature. It's really just a timesaver that adds the info Primstar needs to bake the object. It should make things easier, but doesn't really add anything you couldn't do before. If there's problems with .obj files from zbrush, feel free to send me examples for testing.

I'm really surprised to hear you say that, Little. One of the biggest selling points on Mudbox is its speed. I've never experienced any lag with it all, even when working with millions upon millions of polys at a time. Maybe there's something about your particular hardware configuration that didn't jive with it?




That's not entirely a fair claim.

Just like any other software developer, Autodesk releases updates for their software at no charge. If you go to the Services & Support page right now for Mudbox, you'll find two full service packs have been put out for Mudbox 2009, and there's already one update to Mudbox 2010's license manager (still a bit too early for a ton of udates to 2010; it's brand new). Heck, they're even offering the Mac version of 2009 for free to anyone who's already purchased the Windows version. What more could you want?

Upgrades, however, are a different story. There's a huge difference between upDATES and upGRADES. Yes, going from Mudbox 2009 to Mudbox 2010 will cost you money. It doesn't have to be full retail, though. If you have an Autodesk subscription, upgrades are included.

Dont' get me wrong; it's great that Pixelogic is willing to serve up Zbrush upgrades for free from time to time. They're quite the unusual developer in that regard. But to claim Autodesk doesn't update for free, or that upgrades have to cost the same as full versions, is simply not true.




Again, I'll state that Mudbox is a little behind Zbrush in terms of number of features. But what features it does have are truly second to none in their implementation, as is typical of a great many Autodesk products.

Will Mudbox ever beat Zbrush in market share? I suspect probably not. Zbrush has been around longer, has a much more well known (not to mention cooler sounding) name, and will likely maintain its headstart in amount of features well into the forseeable future. But Mudbox is still a fantastic alternative for those who prefer a more Maya-like interface, rock solid stability (your afrementioned difficulty notwithstanding), and a feature set that is extremely well polished, even if a bit smaller than that of its closest competitor.

Autodesk seems to take the approach with Mudbox that Blizzard takes with games. Nothing new gets added until it's done. I can respect that, even if it tries my patience at times.

Hi Domino! Previously the Zbrush plugin from 2k didn't like it when Zbrush sculpt compatible objects were modified by other programs and brought back into Zbrush. I did a git pull for the development PrimStar scripts, refreshed the menus and imported the Zbrush exported .obj (32x33 standard polymesh sphere). While I could move vertices around, I couldn't sculpt (albeit I was in a bit of a rush and maybe I missed something). But I did move some vertices and then export out as an .obj again for re-import into Zbrush. I'm happy to say that 2k's plugin didn't complain at all and happily complied with a sculpt map that appeared ok with the moved vertices on my local opensim installation.

I repeated this test on both an Ubuntu 9.04 distro with Blender 2.49a and PrimStar and on a Windows XP Pro machine with Blender 2.49b install and PrimStar

I found mudbox really fast and easy to use, its true it doesn't have all the features that Z brush has but I expect in time they will add more. I like Zbrush but the interface is so overwhelming I was able to get sculpting much faster in Mudbox.

GoZ for the PC was reserved for release with ZBrush 4.0 along with Spotlight. The 3.12 Mac version has it though. It seems unlikely at this point that GoZ will include Blender in it's list of support applications, which are currently Maya, Modo and Lightwave.

Mudbox is a lot easier to grasp and learn than ZB due to it's easily understandable interface, and has a couple of definite advantages such as the unfussy method of painting on your object, but it's not faster than ZB and can't hope to shunt around anything like as many polys, it also falls way short on features such as the new zspheres and planar brushes that ZB now sports. I found that Mudbox has a tendency to pull seams apart and symmetry isn't precise with low poly meshes. Conversely, ZB can be a monster to learn adequately. I love them both, but ZB is clearly the better of the two when given time to learn the interface.

As an aside (and only because I can't find the main ZBrush thread) I'm very happy to report that 2k's excellent ZSculpty plugin works perfectly with 3.5. More than can be said for 90% of the 3.1 plugins.

Mudwalker

http://www.mudboxhub.com/

plugin to transfer between most 3d apps from Mudbox and vice versa.

Has anyone had any luck taking polygon primitives created in Maya into Zbrush? I've yet to have one come out good when I did this.
It look great in Maya and Zbrush, but once I get it in world, the sculpty is flat and distorted.
Any ideas?

Awesome! Thanks, Pixel. I guess that's as good an excuse as any to upgrade to Mudbox 10. I've been wanting to use some of the new brushes, anyway. Now I just need to put some money aside for it.