Yes, I know this is a Blender forum, that’s why this thread is here. And I know some people won’t care. But this is well worth informing you guys about.
Pixologic has introduced ZSpheres II, an update to current ZSpheres. This means a better, faster, and stronger modeling workflow. There’s a new skinning method that makes adaptive skin/topology look much, much sexier, and work much better.
Better yet, skinning and 'muscles…Take a look at the video. Modeling, sculpting, rapid prototyping, conceptualizing… they just got much, much easier.
I’m exited!!! Normally, I never use ZSpheres to quickly build a base mesh, because, quite frankly, in my opinion, the current ZSpheres SUCK. Woohoo!!
edit
No, I did not see the ZBrush topic in N&D. Sorry for that
Seems like Pixologic is dead serious about not letting Autodesk steal its marketshare in the sculpting arena.
Seems like the major improvement is using a secondary Z-sphere type for the muscles as well, meanwhile, any idea if Blender 2.5 will make it much easier to do stuff like this in Blender?
I see this new zspheres2 are some type of metaball-voxel thing. That’s the thing about zbrush, taking advance of the voxel-like technology that already works for them and does not crawl like a turtle while you work with not a lot of ram. The only similar way I would think of in blender would be some cheapo metaballs-way, but Pixologic has got lots of money to invest in developing things like this.
I hope durian project sets a new horizon in the sculpting department and I am sure people would donate happily for thinks like this one if needed.
@ Cy
Hopefully, Pixologic would never sell their souls to the devil like so many others have . I had doubts about how successful the next ZB upgrade would be, judging by how amazing Autodesk Mudbox is. But Pixo never ceases to impress, just like Blender .
@ quad
Well, the thing is, nobody aside from Pixologic really knows how this update is going to work. Is it going to improve fuctionality, or slow down its users? At the end of the video, when the guy actually started sculpting, it wasn’t clear whether or not the skinning and muscles produced a clean mesh to sculpt on . Hopefully, there are no overlapping meshes, and hopefully, the base comes out clean.
If ZBrush had voxels like 3DC, then I suppose it wouldn’t matter much.
I really think it is going to work well for them, because the people behind zbrush are plain genious, I dont think they will have any problem at all developing this new zsphere thing.
I dont know how the future is coming, but as you can see in the video its not only going to change the way zspheres are created and converted into clean meshes, it looks like they are going to be usefull even for riggers (look how they move the monster, I dont think they are going to leave that there, I mean it looks like there are some big improvements in the way the mesh is created at posing time).
I dont know very well the mathematics of voxels, but I think zbrush does something similar to software voxels, and those are a bit less demanding than 3dcoat, which are more specialized.
. I had doubts about how successful the next ZB upgrade would be, judging by how amazing Autodesk Mudbox is. But Pixo never ceases to impress, just like Blender