Zbrush 4 has started shipping and looks like an exciting release. New brushes that are more topology sensitive as well as animation features headline a bumper crop of new features including long wished for tools like symmetric and circular masking. New quick ways to generate base meshes (shadowbox) have turned up. I’d have more to say, but regrettably, Pixologic still uses Not-So-Cleverbridge which has reverted all my licenses back to Mac OSX (we’re only on PCs now where I am sitting.) Maybe more news worth reporting next week.
-K
UPDATE: My PC licenses arrived in a new batch today (8/11/2010). Time to see what Pixologic has been up to! :)
Zbrush 3.5 R3 Released
I am truly impressed with the Zbrush 3.5 series, including the latest release R3. Having switched to 64-bit Windows from Mac for my sculpting some time ago, it has enabled me to see the latest innovations in sculpting for Pixologic. (Sadly, Mac versions are still in development with no release date in sight as of this writing.) However, if there ever was a reason for Mac sculptor to get serious about Bootcamp and Windows, Zbrush 3.5R3 may just be the reason.
With the introduction of 3.5, Pixologic introduced us to a sketching with Zspheres. Gone is the need to develop a highly planned armature before sculpting. Sculptors can now grow their base mesh model much like adding tubes or lumps of clay together and then skinning them to create a sculpt-able mesh. The primary output of this workflow is what is referred to as a “unified skin” which is a sort of smoothed voxel construction in space. Probably not an efficient animating form, but for sculpting it has the advantage of being relatively uniform mesh. Pixologic has done considerable magic in their skin generators to handle branching forms (including the more traditionally used adaptive skins.) In 3.5 R3, they have also added considerable features for defining edge loops by merely painting color on the surface of the model. That’s right, in 3.5R3, you can just paint color on the surface of your sculpture and Zbrush with calculate an underlying topology to follow your colors. It is a truely an amazing piece of technology in and of itself.
What’s more important is the sculpting tools. While R1 and R2 offered us glimpses of the power we would see with unified skins, the clay brush types were the primary manipulators of the mesh for sculpting. With the R3, a new category of polish brushes have been introduced. They take a little getting used to, but the gist is this: press lightly, the buff and smooth your surface (like running a wet finger of over clay), press hard and they gouge into the surface or operate like a planer flattening tool. It seems like a bit of an odd combination in words, but when in actual usage, the feel like the ideal detailing tools for working on hard body forms in virtual clay.
R3 also adds a Boolean system for Subtools, so many unique new forms can be quickly established from primitives including boring precise holes into surfaces or alternatively closing up holes or gaps.
Polygroups (essentially selections) have become quite powerful in R3. They can be used to define selections, painted on textures, convert to masks, and even saved as textures (although this feature seems slightly experimental for some–use with caution.) One of the best features is that brushes can be told to automatically mask their actions with the polygroup as you contact the surface of the polygroup, thus confining the brush to that group alone. This will save tones of time detailing a model since hiding polygroups to get a a hard edge is no longer required. (Try this with the layer brush and you’ll see what I mean.)
Projection tools a better than before. This will be handy since unified skins aren’t always the best for animation. With the projection tools a complex mesh can now be easily transferred (color/surface information included) to a more traditional mannequin which can be created through traditional Zsphere adaptive skins, a SDS modeler such as Modo, Topogun, or Zbrush’s own retopology tools.
Clearly Pixologic is committed to innovating Zbrush beyond any other sculpting product out there. The fact that this innovation is free to existing customers of Pixologic is truly an amazing testament to their belief in supporting their customers (compare to Luxology’s $395 upgrade from 301 to 401 on Cinema4D’s latest “point-5″ upgrade weighing in at a hefty $695.) Zbrush is a bargain the digital sculptor cannot overlook.
Modo 401 was released yesterday. USD $395 to update and USD $995 for new seats. While its new animation and enhanced rendering is here, as a modeller, very little has changed. There have been very minor updates to the sculpting system (still a pale refelection of something like Zbrush or Mudbox), the painting is at least multithreaded, but a pale refelection of something like Bodypaint or ZB, and the UV system has been sped-up some, but still isn’t as complete and or advanced as a stand-alone UV tool like UVLayout Pro. Indeed, they are slowly marching towards a “complete package” (similar to Newtek’s Lightwave) but so far hasn’t impressed me that they can ever truly aim at something like Maya, Max, or Softimage without a significant enhancement to their animaiton sub-system. Right now, it seems OK for motion graphics, but it is a devil to really animate. Luxology is showing things akin to character animation on their web site, but be very cautious before parting with your money. While it may be true that some of these projects were modeled and rendered in Modo401, the actual animating appears to have taken place in external programs (like Messiah or Motion-builder) and the animation has been re-imported into Modo. In other words, you need to do your animaiton elsewhere before rendering in Modo.
Details of the upgrade can be found here: http://www.luxology.com/modo/product_information/documents/modo401_Improvements.pdf. The modelling, sculpting, painting, and UV sections I think speak for themselves.
Mudbox 2009 For Mac is Shipping
With unusually little fanfare, Autodesk Mudbox 2009 is now shipping for the Mac. It looks like there will be 30-day demo version available next week. Read about here: http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/25575/. Not suprisingly, Pixologic (makers of Zbrush) erradicated the thread on their forums written by concerned Mac users about the lack of displacement map generation. ZB 3.5 is still lost in space, so mac users might want to join the Mudbox party at DashDotSlash.Net, where you can find lots of tutorial material from Wayne Robson (former ZB guru) on the new sculpting entry on the Mac, Mudbox: http://www.dashdotslash.net/.
Zbrush Mechanical Part 11, Wireframes
Wireframe cages are handy. They’re pretty easy to make. In fact, you can make a wireframe of any mesh’s level 1 polygons quite easily. You start with your basic mesh, and apply UVTile UVs from the UV pallet.
Subdivide the model 3 or 4 times so you have some nice detailed geometry to work with and store a Morph Target use “StoreMT” on the Morph Target pallet–we’ll need this later.
Next, we want to mask the wire look. This is easy–alpha 28. It just looks like a square smaller than the the full alpha space.
Use “Mask by Alpha” on the Masking subpallet and invert. I filled out the mask top and bottom squares from my alpha because I’m going to want a place to drop in a logo later. 
A quick application of inflate and we have the shape protruding up from the basic object. 
If only Zbrush had a way to just save this frame and chuck the rest. It does! Remember that morph target we saved? Well, there is another handy button on the Morph Target panel marked “Create Diff”. Press it once and it will create a new tool in the tool pallet which is the difference between the existing mesh and its stored morph target. Since we only raised up the wire shape, that’s the only difference and that’s what we’ll have left, leaving us with nice wireframe shape.
I’m Famous (or Infamous)
I’m quoted in 3D World’s March 2009 issue in the Article, Zbrush for Mac Trips Up. I won’t reprint the whole article here since the specter of copyright violation has been raised (oddly by Pixologic and not 3D World.) Relying on the journalistic protections of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution and subsequent “Fair Use” rulings of the US Supreme court, I’ll entertain you here with a few tidbits from the article, which can be found on page 28 of the March issue.
The article begins with: “The relationship between Zbrush Developer Pixologic and some Mac-owning members of its customer base have deteriorated after the company’s garbled response to an apparent major bug in the latest release of Zbrush for Mac OS X.
I’m quoted as saying (from one of my forum posts on the subject): “It’s important for Pixologic to understand that incompleteness, costly work-arounds, and unknown timelines for fixes simply to reach parity in key functionality [with the Windows release] is not what we expect as customers.”
Jamie Labelle (Pixologic’s General manager) is quoted in the same article as saying: “There was a problem on our side with lack of communication . . . but for some it does work and for others, it is an issue.”
Labelle did not rule out a patch. He is quoted in the article as saying “It depends on how [the tool] will be re-written.”
This isn’t really a Zbrush tip, per se, but I’m often surprised by frustrated modelers when they hit a wall saying, “This is way too complex!” What they sometimes have failed to notice, in the pursuit of efficient modeling is that complex machines are often built out of assemblies which are made of subassemblies which are made up of even smaller sub-assemblies and ultimately out of individual (often cast) parts. Observation of existing machines (and even disassembling a few) can improve your mechanical modeling. To approach this piece of a leg, I didn’t start with the whole piece. Instead, I recognized the sides were (at least in my concept sketch) just a mirrored pair of simple subassemblies. A couple of cylinders and box (suitable beveled by masking and inflating.
Thanks to subtools, I only had to make one cylinder and one box which makes the basic strut
Since I don’t plan to take this apart, I went ahead and merged these into a single tool–if I thought I would need to edit the diameters of the cylinders or something, I might have left these in pieces to adjust them. (I do bend them, but fortunately I don’t need them in pieces for that. To build up more of my machine part, I then take two of the assemblies plus a hollow cylinder to build up my next subassembly.
I haven’t built out some super machine with this yet (it will probably be the shin of some mechanical dinosaur when I’m done with it) but you get the idea–work with bite-sized parts and pretty quickly you can get some complex machinery (even without sophisticated texturing.) This whole mechanical part was really created with just 3 simple forms, suitably scaled, deformed, and positioned.
Add a few more assemblies:
This trick really isn’t mine as much as a simplification of Lemonnado’s excellent tutorial on making Greebles with masks (Zeebles). (You can view the full tutorial here.) The point I want to show you here is that UV’s can play a very helpful role in making repeating detail. Here we take a simple form, made up of a few polygons, and decorate it with a repeating geometry with very little work.
Step 1) Go to the UV menu (or the Texture Menu in earlier versions of ZB3) and select the UVTile button. This will stack/overlap each polygon on top of the UV space. Normally, overlapping UV’s is a BadThing™, but in this case, this is exactly what we want.
Step 2) Subdivide the object to get lots of detail–about 1M polygons (8 levels)
Step 3) Go to the texture menu and select a texture that would look nice. A seamless texture will also look cool. I picked built-in Texture 13, which looks tailored made for Greebles. In one step, the whole object is covered with texture, 1 copy for each polygon at level 1
Step 4) Covert the texture to a mask by going to the Masking pallet and select “Mask by Intensity”. For clarity, you can turn the texture off if you want.
Step 5) Inflate once or twice to bring out the geometry.
A little texturing and it has a nice tech technical surface. Try this with other alphas or make your own after looking at Lemonnado’s Tutorial.
Zbrush Mechanical Part 8, Sweeping Up
Zbrush has a handy tool that isn’t always well understood, the Sweep3D primitive, which is akin to the lathe tool you might find in other 3D apps. What is handy, is that you can pick the number of sides you want, as well as quickly set up for a simple or complex profile. Here is a simple 8-sided sweep.
With pretty straight forward parameters in it’s initialize menu:
There are two profiles to set for a Sweep3D object. The first and most important to the shape is the S Profile, which controls the outer shape of the object. To add control points, just tap on the graph. To remove control points, just drag the point off the graph.
The trouble for some users is that the line interpreted between the points is a spline and often doesn’t give a more angular shape. It isn’t obvious, but when you select a point on a graph, a circle appears around the point like a halo. That circle isn’t just to highlight the point–it also controls how smooth the line is that passes through the point! Draw the circle close to the point by dragging its rim, the point gets sharper–further away, the line through the point gets softer. Neat!
The second profile, T Profile, controls the thickness of the object that is swept. By default it give a nice even thickness top and bottom, so I leave this alone.
After converting my simple octagonal object to a poly mesh, and subdivided it 8 times with SMT (smooth) off, I can then start decorating it to make it a little more mechanical looking. Picking a simple alpha from my collection (this one from Codeman Studios) I can just drag a marquee of the alpha by starting my click off the object and dragging across. Do it twice, and I have a nice set up to inflate some ridges from the surface.
A couple of inflates (deformation menu) and then Iuse radial symmetry of 8 and couple of different alphas to decorate the object further getting something like this.
Add texture and I have another mechanical part for a machine.
Zbrush Mechanical Part 7, Nurnies
For years, model makers, whether working in the real or 3D world have known one secret to making things look realistic is often to add small details that represent the mechanical surface of the machine in question. To speed things up, especially in the days when we worked in styrene instead of bits, small pre-made casts of mechanical “bits”, referred to as nurnies or greebles were glued to objects to make that object look “real.” It’s a convincing illusion, even with the simplest model. In this example, I’ve taken the simplest model I could think of, a straight edged cube. For a real project, I would mix in six or seven nurnie types to increase the complexity of the surface, but for this example, I just used one, a hatch and varied its size. Zbrush has a fast way to do this–it’s called the Mesh Insert brush.
A Nurnie By Meshweaver
The Mesh Insert brush allows you to pick another model and just stick it to the surface of the model. The “Brush Mod” slider controls how deep the object will be placed on the surface. (I often slide it up around +40 to +60 so that the nurnie generally riding right on the surface.
The main point of nurnies is to save time, so you may want model for yourself a few Lego-like pieces to stick onto your next project. I have a library of few hundred in various resolutions I’ve kept handy for my projects. :)
If you really want to save yourself time, Meshweaver Productions make two very extensive collections. For £82.48 GBP (about $125 USD), you can have hundreds (about 550, each rendered in multiple resolutions) of detailed nurnies in your library which represent hundred of hours of saved work. The hatch I used is from their second collection of of parts, many based on tank pieces. (I don’t take compensation on this blog–I bought these myself and really, really like this product.)
If you look back at part 5 of this series on Zbrush Mechanical, you’ll quickly be able to make fast alphas from your nurnies as well, expanding the possibilities for high quality detailing of your mechanical projects.
If you’re serious about mechanical modeling and surfacing, you owe it yourself to learn about nurnies and start collect your own parts for nurnification.