New 3D painting program

[Gary David Bouton]

Hi, All--

There's a new product from Pixelogic called Zbrush. I've never seen anything like it! My friend Danny Huff became an expert at it like in days. You do not screw around with splines and stuff. Instead, you use the right brush, texture, and move 3D renderings around *after* you paint them.

Check out this thing I did in 5 minutes (you all can probably do it in 3!), and check out the demo at www.pixelogic.com.

Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Gary David Bouton]

Hi, All--

There's a new product from Pixelogic called Zbrush. I've never seen anything like it! My friend Danny Huff became an expert at it like in days. You do not screw around with splines and stuff. Instead, you use the right brush, texture, and move 3D renderings around *after* you paint them.

Check out this thing I did in 5 minutes (you all can probably do it in 3!), and check out the demo at www.pixelogic.com.

Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Gary David Bouton]

Sorry about my previous post. I mistyped the URL for the demo to ZBrush.

It's www.pixologic.com

Humbly,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Bob C.]

Hi Gary,

I mostly lurk here spending my time in XaraX and some in Corel.

Great image you made, I was wondering how this program compares to TrueSpace? They cost about the same now.

I have never used a 3D progrgam - Well I do have CorelDream3D Yikes! Never was able to get past the interface and have not retried in more than a year now!

I would be interested in your comments.

Bob C.

[Dan Huff]

Hello, everyone. My name is Danny Huff and I just joined this illustrious forum. I've gotta say, there are a lot of very talented and knowledgable people here and I'm very much looking forward to sharing and learning whatever I can.

Gary is absolutely right about Zbrush. It is a FANTASTIC new program(by the way, Gary, thank you for the compliment). You can model quite extensively with it, paint with it, light with it, import and export objects, texture,...the list goes on. It has a fairly short learning curve, as long as you download all of their tutorials and manuals. There is also a great wealth of tutorials, tips, and general Zbrush knowledge at ZbrushCentral.

You can also find some great examples of the capabilities of this program at Renderosity.com's Zbrush Gallery

Please excuse the subject matter, but this is a pic I did after having the program about two weeks. I know a lot more about it now and would've done things differently had I known more then, but this program has a LOT of depth! It has the most intuitive sculpting controls of any 3D program I've ever used. It really isn't fully 3D all the time. Once you finish modeling an object, you "snapshot" it onto your canvas, locking it into place, where you can texturize, paint, or add to it with other objects or materials. Read up on it, you'll see what I mean. Pixologic describes it as "2.5D". It supports layers and can export rendered images as Photoshop images or bmp's.

All in all, it is a FUN and addictive program to use. Objects and images can be created in much less time than other 3D programs. Check it out. I'm an addict.

Danny Huff
http://www.asherrocks.com
(I'm the guy who USED to have a lot of excess hair)

[Gary David Bouton]

Hi Bob C. and glad you lurk no more--

If you're looking to express yourself in 3 dimensions, I'll tell a complete novice what I've said many times...ya can't top Adobe Dimensions for simple, intuitive 3D images, vector or raster...your choice.

trueSpace is a modeling program on steroids--it fairly gets a hernia with all that they've packed into it from high end programs. If you don't know or care what metaballs, radiosity (shadow tracing against rough surfaces instead of mirror finishes), boolean operations such as subtract and add, or animation is, you might stick with Dimensions. I'm not being a smartass here: trueSpace has a high learning curve, mostly because of the interface. It took me 3YEARS to master the interface....no menus...it's all icons. God, would I love to take trueSpace's features and redesign the interface myself.

ZBrush is simply incredible. It's modeling and rendering at the same time. So you drag a brush and produce a sphere. Then you can light it, texture it, move it...it's too weird for words, in a good way, as you can see by the art here. Check out their gallery.

Y'see, 3D is nothing more than 2D after it's been rendered, and Pixologic has taken the inbetween step out.

And Danny (where'd your hair go?<g>) is right; ZBrush IS fun.

I have to stop being such an inflexible fogey and get with the program...or programs.

I leave you now with a tiny animation I did by hand.

Kindest Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Bob C.]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for your response. I did spend about an hour looking at all the remarkable images done in ZBrush. Several amazing images by “Nikko�, nice work Dan!

3 years to learn TrueSpace -Groan- I thought because it was mostly GUI it would easier to learn!? I have used AutoCad and more recently TurboCad, so I am somewhat familiar with 3D drawing but not much with rendering, (I guess that’s what it is called to add the fancy surfaces etc.)?

I’m a bit confused by your apple and orange statement. Is TrueSpace the apple and ZBrush the orange or Adobe Dimensions the “other fruit�? You seemed to have gotten
the “hang� of ZBrush very quickly. Is that because of your experience with TrueSpace? You said ZBrush is, “modeling and rendering at the same time.� Does TrueSpace only model?

I spent some time at Adobe looking at a very scant set of images done by Dimensions, in fact only part of the images - never an entire image done in Dimensions. They look very plastic and very “computer sterile� not what I was thinking of.

I am interested in animation - does ZBrush do animation, I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere? I hope all these newbie questions aren’t nagging!

What program did you do the animation? Love the shadow following along! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Thanks for any consideration,

Bob Centamore

[Erik Heyninck]

I downloaded a demo at the end of last year and I didn't fall for it. The interface is too much darkside for me, and although I was impressed at first sight, my enthusiasm cooled rather quick. Because what "one" can do with is is fun etc, but I didn't see what "I" could do with it.

Still, I won't say anything negative about it, and perhaps now I might think differently.

This is an image I made in it:

[Gary David Bouton]

Hi Bob--

You asked a larger question than you think. Let me use a bulleted list here, for accuracy's sake:

•trueSpace is bot a modeling and rendering program. Plus it does animation. The reason I tend to dis it is because the rendering part is a lot easier to learn than the modeling tools. In fact I spent half a day today in tired, old Extreme 3D instead of facing the "fate" of 3D programs on the Windows platform at present.

•I can show you, if you like, examples of Dimensions work that's more inspiring than the crap Adobe puts on their site. But it is true that everything either looks like plastic or dough. There's no shadows, no reflection mapping and no bump mapping. BUT, it is a foolproof way to get a good start on 3D for the price of a Christmas present (to someone you really like).

•ZBrush is the oddball, Bob. There's no real splines to work with and stuff. As soon as you paint a stroke, the program stanslates it into 3D space, if you look quickly, you'll see wire mesh forming (like if you used it on a P133mHz machine), and then before you know it, you've got a composition that look like it was done in a modeling program.

I'd like to point out that the best programs have what is called low-level control. That means that you can go backstage and fool around with the parameters a little. trueSpace, on the other hand is a "high-level" control program. The user is insulated a lot from what's going on, and I do not care all that much from having controls hidden from me. I began to read a book on animation last night, that was for Maya designers. The program, admittedly with a huge price tag, is ULTRA low-level control. You can do just about anything except fix that third row from the right green pixel...you know? <g>

The animation I did was by hand. I started with a few poses of my cartoon character Dexter, brought the work into XARA, fooled around with shadows manually (a lot of rendering programs render shadows that are mathematically correct, but simply don't look good...so you wing it and it looks fine). XARA exported the eight frames as a GIF.

Here's a larger look at Dexter.

Kindest Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Bob C.]

Erik;
An interesting image you made in ZBrush, very different from the images I've seen.

Gary;

I would be interested in seeing some examples of Adobe's Dimensions from your experienced hand. That might help a great deal.

Thanks VERY MUCH for your answer about TS vs ZB.

Xara's animation capabilities are wonderful, was your 3D file of Dexter dxf that was loaded into Xara? Maybe you could start a new post this is getting huge with that large ZBrush posts.

Thanks again