It’s clear that Pixologic is saying " We aren’t scared and we accept the challenge " then slapped the Cloth brushes first in the video to send a direct message to Blender because if it was something else they wouldn’t have waited years until Blender made Cloth brushes a hot topic.
5 Likes
Pixologic will never be scared. They have the resources,manpower and skill to develop anything Blender comes up with, and even add on top of that. Let’s not forget that they have to put all that in what in blender is just one branch. While blender has to spread all over the place with less.
But I’m actually happy that Blender is actually pushing the development of other software…that was relatively stagnant for years. Which is a bit of shaming the user for their money. Now again they have to work hard to win users. Which again is only +++ for the end user.
Seeing Pixologic implementing a cloth brush in Zbrush, I have to say that the 5 euro donation I was making every month for Blender, was the best spent 5 euro in years.
4 Likes
that my point, they’re saying we will take you heads on.
A little background on the history of Pixologic…
Releases the most revolutionary 3D modeling workflow since Sub-D made the INCREDIBLY arduous process of stitching NURBS patches together to create models obsolete. Blows minds for years before a competitor emerges.
Mudbox is created at WETA Digital. It is built during production of LOTR, has a very slick and intuitive UI, is a true 3D environment, is just as powerful as Zbrush in performance, has industry proven tools, bakes UDIM displacement, has excellent sculpt/paint layer system…the industry is amazed - 'surely Zbrush will adapt and standardise the workflow/UI/etc…
Pixologic…doesn’t even flinch. Maintains its ethos, design vision, and unique workflows/tools
3D Coat comes along. Heralded unwrap and manual retopology tools. Features a shiny new Voxel remesh system and has the potential to upset Zbrush…
Pixologic…doesn’t even flinch. Maintains its ethos, design vision, and unique workflows/tools
Modo started to get pretty decent seeming sculpting tools. Built into a 3D DCC. Blender does the same. Years later Blender 2.80 gets a sculpting upgrade…
Basically, as long as Pixologic have existed they do what they do and care little for what other programs are doing. It has remained one of the least ‘corporate’ 3D companies there is(if not THE most) The free upgrades for life demonstrates this. Zbrush has been firmly entrenched in every nook and cranny of the industry for a decade and still remains completely unchallenged. It dominates, and after all this time there is still no competition. If Mudbox hadn’t been sold by Skymatter all those years ago, then who knows?
Blender is probably the closest thing these days to a ‘challenger’, but it’s a single man against the most innovative and creative 3D company in the world. It’s David Vs Goliath.
As for the Cloth tools, I’m guessing they’ve been in development for quite some time. Sculpting cloth was always something that a lot of sculptors found difficult, hence the popularity of Marvelous Designer. A cloth system was always inevitable, whether Blender existed or not. I very much doubt that they saw a Pablo post on Twitter and started panicking. 
Also, it’s an entire cloth system, not just a brush. We can already see it working with Micromesh and a massive preset library.
10 Likes
nah david beated goliath, someday blender will do that to zbrush, and to maya as well 
…
3 Likes
I totally agree. Pixologic being a more sympathetic company than let’s say… Autodesk is one of the reasons why ZBrush remains one of the few 3D tools I use next to Blender. I’m always a sucker for the oddball in the crowd, and ZBrush is quite a special, talented oddball.
I do think 3D-Coat’s Autopo inspired Pixo to incorporate QRemesher, respectively ZRemesher, to name an example. I’m sure Pixo devs have meetings where they take a look at interesting features of the competition and decide which feature would be valuable to add to ZBrush. It’d be odd and unwise if they wouldn’t.
7 Likes
Of course, without the inspiration, admiration, and ‘imitation is the best form of flattery’ attitude, this CG industry would be a dull place indeed. 
My point was more that Pixologic are who they are. The don’t ‘jump on the bandwagon’ like Adesk(usually 2 years too late) They innovate and sometimes imitate, but not because it’s trendy or they feel they need to compete, but because they think ‘that would be a great addition to the Zbrush ecosystem’.
Every single sculpting tool in every single program has been a direct result of inspiration from ZB, only fair that it’s reciprocal from time to time.
2 Likes
Maybe, maybe not, but either way I’m so glad we got Dynamesh instead of a Voxel solution. Also, don’t forget that ZB could remesh and project long before Qremesher.
2 Likes
They’d better spend some time to add alembic support.
Export big polycounts to crappy obj in 2020? Seriously?
Agisoft guys adeed alembic support to photoscan in two weeks or so, and they work with even higher polycounts then zbrush.
Governments of all countries should adopt a special law that will restrict to use obj format already.
The future is USD
4 Likes
anything that is not an OBJ !!
obj is not a 3d format - it is a text document. No compression and superslow IO.
also alembics could be directly referenced into usd )).
People seem to be committing the fallacy of attributing correlation as causation since I’m not seeing anything to indicate otherwise. Sure, the Blender cloth tool was released first, but it wasn’t the first 3D cloth tool, and you’re probably right that ZBrush’s was being developed before Blender made a splash with it.
But if I were to take guess, I think there’s a good chance Blender’s implementation may have encouraged them to release their new update with this cloth dynamics integration.
Either that, or maybe they’d been planning to release it this year anyways and possibly felt a little sad when Blender did it first couple months before, haha.
2 Likes
I’m not knocking Pablo’s work for a second. To be honest, I never care too much about who came up with what idea first in 3D toolsets, it’s the end result, usability, and how is it going to make my workflow more enjoyable and productive that I put my passion into. That’s the motivation for me. That’s why I left Max after 15 years and embraced Blender wholeheartedly.
5 Likes
Obj doesn’t fit to every usecase and storage efficiency and textbased formats are orthogonal to each other, but there are lots of good reasons for having also textbased 3d file formats.
And OBJ IS a 3d format. A super simple one and very old, but that’s finally the reason for it being so widespread.
There are a lot of textbased 3dformats available (some also far more feature rich)
Mayas ma fileformat is also textbased and is a 3dformat.
Perhaps you meant binary formats as the way to go, that has nothing to do with compression by itself, the representation is just more compact. And compressed data and superfast IO are conflicting aspects. Compressed data has to get uncompressed before it can be processed, what harms IO speed.
1 Like
ma is actually just *.mel script that is being interpeted by maya and recreates geometry on load. It is super inifficient for storing heavy data.
Problem is that any text based format works like that - program need to read it line by line and recreate it’s contents.
And compressed data and superfast IO are conflicting aspects.
What I mean by compression in alembic or usd - is not just some zip or rle over the whole data. They organize 3d data in specialazed structures that allow compression where possible in a smart way. And same structure allows to actually load data almost directly into a memory. Alembic’s ogawa even allow to multithread reading of data. Compression/Uncompression sure adds some overhead but it is compensated with optimized access.
That’s why alembic import is 20-30 (or more) times faster in any program i know, and filesize is twice lighter.
there are lots of good reasons for having also textbased 3d file formats
it certainly is. If you have some highly automated pipeline where those files are often modified (or generated) by scripting.
That’s why usd (for example) allows to mix both. You would usually have your main usd stage as a text file but all heavy stuff will be referenced as layers from separate binary usd files or alembics.
I guess it shows just how much of an impact Blender is making even amongst professional software houses - as the saying goes “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”
Surely it’s ultimate proof that blender is no longer a hobbyists curiosity - but a serious (and in some cases groundbreaking) graphics tool.
even in Zbrush - reading and saving ztl is almost instant.
But exporting/importing obj could take minutes of time and often even crash zbrush itself.
I exported many-million-polygons sized files from agisoft photoscan to alembics - it is almos as fast as write ztl from zbrush.
Hi guys,
Please try to wrap up the ZBrush and 3D file format sub-discussion, otherwise we’re deviating from the main topic too extensively. Thanks.
There’s a dedicated ZBrush 2021 topic where you’re welcome to participate:
6 Likes
Kind of. Compression/decompression can happen directly in memory streams, which is much faster than trying to rely on disk IO. A small binary format loaded to memory, decoded, and unencrypted can often times be faster on modern hardware than a raw unencoded text format just being loaded from disk into memory.
That is a new falloff type with lots of variables (11 settings).
You can probably build several different useful brushes with that.
That just requires to take time to find good combinations of values.
Roadmap is only mentioning Sculpt Vertex Paint mode until 2.92.
What would have been done for vertex paint mode and is pertinent, will be transferred to Texture paint mode.
Work on Brush Management is supposed to happen during 2.91/292 development.
So, it should start, soon. That concerns any mode using brushes.
3 Likes