Zbrush price update#

Pixologic doesn’t always respond to industry needs, but has a habit of coming up with unique ways to solve problems.

Zbrush price update#

ZBrush is still clearly the market-leader in digital sculpting packages, and this 2019 update brings some diverse new features and tools. Pixologic also added some new plugins, including Intersection Masker, allowing you to use a mesh to mask, and ZColor, which enhances digital painting tasks. Of course, this now plays well with programs like KeyShot. You can match the focal length of imported photographs and you can save some of the settings to reuse in other scenes. There is a focal length control, crop factor and even import and export functions. ZBrush 2019 adds the Universal Camera, which now gives us some of the basic functions we would see in other 3D cameras. It is there as we are looking through it when we work, but it has always been seen as a weakness. The ZBrush camera has often baffled new users as you could argue that it doesn’t really exist in any recognisable way. This release brings a new camera system that will be more familiar to 3D artists It is a novel way to add 3D geometry from 2D patterns and shapes.

Using complex greyscale images and the live Boolean function in the SubTool panel enables you to make extremely complex shapes very quickly. For example, if you take a greyscale image of a white cube on a black background and apply it through Spotlight, it will create a cube of that shape and size. What’s different is that the textures, rather than applying anything to the model below, allow you to convert the image to a 3D model as a subtool. Snapshot 3D works in the same way and as part of the Spotlight wheel. It came in the form of a wheel that, when activated, allowed you to place the image or portion of the image over your model and then paint through, adding the texture to the surface below. Spotlight was introduced to allow an artist to take any image (texture) and project it onto the surface of a model using Polypaint. Snapshot 3D is an enhancement to the functions found on the Spotlight wheel. Having used it for a few days it is a massive help in organising your creations, and it seems a shame that we only have one folder level and we can’t nest them (yet). The ability to move, scale and rotate the whole folder is a real bonus. Subtools can be placed into folders and there is even a folder setting button allowing you to access lots of folder actions like delete, transpose, merge and Boolean. Good naming conventions helped, but a true folder system was needed and that’s now been added.

This becomes a real issue when you get into hundreds of subtools per character. One big gripe with the subtool system in ZBrush has always been that you can’t easily group and manage your subtools effectively. This latest version works better for hard-surface models as it can detect sharp surface angles and even maintain creased edges, as well as giving you polygroups.