I used Blender since 2.42 as I recall. I sucked it up, got tutorials and learned GUI. That’s all it takes - understanding that a job needs to be done and it just takes small effort to learn new GUI.
By the way, 2.5x GUI is not that much different from 2.49
I remember first using zbrush…i wanted to throw the computer along with the cintiq out of the window. I mean what were they thinking. I have the pleasure of being in contact with a few pixologic devs, and i remember one of them asking a group of students what they like most about Zbrush and what they like least about it. Every single one of them said the UI. He wrote them off as being crazy. The reason the interface is different, is two fold. One, they just wanted to be different, and two, its based around real life sculpting set ups.
Think of a desk with tools along the sides and a flat workspace in the center. It makes some sort of twisted sense when you think of it that way and when they have designed it around a wacom pen rather than a mouse and keyboard.
Its not hard to adjust to either, as its not as… complicated as it seems at first. Everything is quite organized, and easy to use. It is perfecting the technique and all the features which becomes the real road block. There is no other app truly like zbrush, none can really compare to it. It has no real competition in my book for what it is able to do. They will probably never design zbrush’s UI, but after dealing with it for a month it works. It, like other apps still approaches the user with a workspace and tools type of environment, counter to Blender’s approach.
Something like Blender on the other hand, well it cant really afford to be too alien and weird since there are so many other applications out there that directly compete with it or do what it does.
As for Mudbox, that is one wonderfully designed app. Its one of those things you can just pick up and use since it all makes sense and is obvious. Mudbox really shines with texture painting and map generating, not so much with sculpting.
Yeah mudbox texturepaint/projection is pretty neat but its sculpting is a bit weird imo.
One thing that should be fixed with the projection is that you wouldn’t have to have the darn image blocking your view. More like a clone stamp with an offset so you don’t have to paint “through” the image. Pretty offtopic.
Anywho Zbrush is quite awesome indeed and I’m impressed by what it has had to offer so far.
Which is the problem! ^^
Yeah I cant imagine using mudbox for anything other than texture painting. I would rather blender catch up to mudbox’s level because quite frankly I would hate to shell out $700 just for a painting application. As for hiding the image, all you have to do is press Q i believe and it hides the image. Zbrush’s spot light is godly but i hate not being able to paint on a low poly image from within zbrush (you have to go high poly and then bake the polypaint onto a low poly or export it as a texture map (which usually turns out bad), at least for me (unless its super high poly).
Yeah I know about the hiding but you can’t really paint if you can’t see what you’re painting. If you had an offset (like the photoshop clone brush or bproject addon for blender) it would work a lot better in my opinion.
Yeah well polypaint has its disadvantages ofcourse.
Has the upgrade process gone smoothly for those that tried it? I seem to have pot luck each time they release something with the registration/activation/etc. Fan of the program once it’s up and running though.
I wouldn’t know since I don’t have it but my pal used to complain or at least at some point was frustrated about getting the download link late when Zbrush gets updated. Dunno if that’s what you meant though.
My upgrade to R4 was completely painless, and it left R3 alone, so I now have working R3 and R4 on my box (that may be standard practice - I only bought ZBrush a few months back).
It’s not accepting my serial and email address for the DL link, but that also may be due to not upgrading to R3 (thought I did but probably forgot). I’ll probably have to send in a ticket, so yeah not always a painless experience.
Thanks all for the responses already.
It’s not accepting my serial and email address for the DL link, but that also may be due to not upgrading to R3 (thought I did but probably forgot). I’ll probably have to send in a ticket, so yeah not always a painless experience.
That’s the sort of thing I was getting at. I’ve been using it on and off since version 2 (just) and I was quite happy that I only had to go through the registration/activation process twice for the last upgrade before it worked.
Might let it sit for a week or two until their servers cool down a little.
So i found out it was just the usual delay in sending out the email’s with the proper serials. =) Zbrush r4ing already and its quite nice.
Download and installation went really easy. Luckily I picked up the update just minutes after its release so little traffic. Read the installation instructions on the site. If you have R3 then just install. If you are still on any earlier versions you’ll need to deactivate zbrush before installing.
Have you tried the Qremesher/autoretopology?
I did tried it on a very complicated mesh, not a t pose.
Hands-fingers already posed, touching the body, a little into it.
I’m impressed, this tool made it possible! This is a little magic you know. LOL
I also played forcing these loop guides, they produce perfect and clean loops. I wonder, this is almost ready for rigging… almost I said. Right? LOL
The qremesher seems working good,except when you have limbs bent more than 35/45 degrees.
In this case it seems that,at the joint of the limb,qremesher it’s not able to give the right result.
I have to see if there is a way to force a cylinder topology on a bent limb(for example for insects or alien characters)
@renderdemon
Have you tried the loop guides? You have to play with a slider there to make them forced. (hold shift as you draw to have complete loops). I also noticed that these guides work better if you don’t use the density mask.
There’s a nice implementation in manual retopo tools too, try to edit some parts.
It’s too early to say but Qremesher looks good.
Hi Michalis,I’m testing the guides now(before I tried only the automatic stuff).
Actually the curve guides seem helping a lot.
I agree with you that we need to be cautious about qremesher(I dream a good remeshing tool since years,maybe we have found it:)).
I’ve not had time to try it out yet. I thought that some of the meshes looked a bit ‘lumpy’ compared to a dedicated re-mesh. I’ll try it out this weekend.
There’s a slider under geometry/QRemesher panel. “CurveStiffness”. This is important to have these curves forcing geometry of cage retopo mesh.
I tried it on very complicated meshes, full of fingers, nails, holes and holes inside holes LOL. It works perfectly. A great tool!
In five-ten mins I’m able to have a retopo multi res mesh, groups, UVs (UVmaster), baked and textured, exported as low poly as you like in cycles and render. Not bad at all! (don’t forget to flip vertical the displacement, AO, cavity maps LOL)
Very interesting!
Michalis, do you fancy posting a couple of images of the mesh, the retopo and the result? sounds too good to be true!