"Da Boss"

[Dan Huff]

Just another Zbrush image. I haven't seen much notice of Zbrush on this board, except for our beloved moderator's mention of it. You really should check it out. It has many features completely unique to it and has capabilities no other program can match. I DON'T work for the company. I just love the product.

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

[Earl]

Hi Danny,

That's a great illustration. I have a lot of respect for ZBrush. The program itself is quite unique. While I'm more of a fan of traditional 3d programs, ZBrush grabbed my attention from the very beginning (about a year ago?). Unfortunately, I was never able to get the knack of it. Or rather, I was never able to produce results that could compete with the results I could get with LightWave in a similar amount of time. Perhaps it's because I'm less of a 'hands-on' artist than I am of a 'conceptualize, plan, then carefully build' artist. I guess that could be missleading...

Anyhow, your illustration is great. I love seeing what others can accomplish..especially using methods or programs that are 'foreign' to me. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Earl]

Danny,

Excellent comparison between the two different 'styles' of applications. As ZBrush is extremely unique and one of a kind, it often makes it hard to explain the differences and similarities between it and traditional 3d applications. I thought you did an excellent job. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Dan Huff]

Just another Zbrush image. I haven't seen much notice of Zbrush on this board, except for our beloved moderator's mention of it. You really should check it out. It has many features completely unique to it and has capabilities no other program can match. I DON'T work for the company. I just love the product.

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

[jens g.r. benthien]

Danny,

how long did it take to finish the pic?

Just curious, because I might try ZBrush in addition to my 3D apps. The result is absolutely fantastic!

jens

[Dan Huff]

Hey, Bob C! I think your choice betweeen Zbrush and TrueSpace really boils down to what you intend to do with the program.

Zbrush is a program unlike any others. You start out with a tool, whether it be a sphere, square, torus, or whatever, and can modify the heck out of it, combine it with other tools, and when you have it to the point where you are satisfied with it, you "snapshot" it to the canvas, then you can no longer rotate it. But it still retains it's 3-dimensional attributes. For example if you "draw" hair coming out of a sphere, you can have it perpendicular to the surface of that sphere, and the perpective and angles of that hair will change relative to the surface on which they are drawn. Other tools may or may not affect the original snapshot piece in the same manner, depending on the settings of the controls. You can paint on the snapshot object with different materials, adding or subtracting mass, or just applying RGB color or a bimapped texture. And there are quite a few different tools, different brush types that affect different things, and you can create your own brush alphas if you can't find one amongst their prodigious collection. You have a great deal of control over lighting, reflections, depth of field, and many other parts of the whole picture. You can also export the aforementioned "tools" as .obj or .dxf formats for use with other programs, as well as importing the same. The potential for use with a program like Poser, for example, is unlimited.

But the thing that really hooked me was the user interface. I haven't had a lot of experience with 3D apps, just mostly playing around with them a bit. But I have sculpted a bit with real clay in my life. Zbrush's interface is IDEAL for a person with even a little "hands-on" media experience. I downloaded the demo and was having a blast with all the different tools and controls within just a few minutes, creating things I couldn't believe I was creating. So it's interface is extremely intuitive, at least from my point of view. But there ARE a ton of things to learn about the program, if you want to probe it's depths. It has many great capabilities. To explore all of them will take some time. But that is true for ANY great program out there.

TrueSpace is a fantastic program, offering more bang for the buck than any other 3D application of it's type. It's got great modeling, lighting, and rendering controls. But there's gonna be a learning curve involved. It doesn't have the same kind of interface as Zbrush, by a long shot. It's not geared toward a natural artist. It is more comparable to other 3d apps like 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, etc, using meshes, nurbs, metaballs, etc. Texturizing is another matter. You'll need Photoshop or something like that to get great textures. Plus you can animate with TrueSpace, and darn well, too! But note it is $300 compared to a couple thousand bucks or more for the other apps I just mentioned. It really is an incredible deal.

Actually our extremely knowledgable moderator, Gary David Bouton, could tell you a heck of a lot more about TrueSpace than I. How about it Gary?

For the price, either program is an incredible value. If you want to animate your creations, I'd say go with TrueSpace, at least for now. If you want to create images with a more organic feel,I'd say go with Zbrush, although it's excellent at producing images with metal, glass, stone, or whatever, textures as well.

Both programs are available as demo downloads from their respective websites. Why don't you download them both, try them out, and find which(if not BOTH)is right for you?
<A HREF="http://pixologic.com/" TARGET=_blank>Pixologic Zbrush
</A>Caligari TrueSpace

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

[Dan Huff]

Hey, Jay! I'm not really sure how much time I have altogether. I started out with a tool made by a guy known on the ZbrushCentral forum as Ed_the_atom, and here's a pic of the original "bloke" tool. I modified it quite extensively. I probably spent a few hours modeling and fine-tuning the pieces, a couple hours painting and texturing the boss, eyes, horns, cigar, etc, a couple hours rendering, playing with fog, re-rendering, playing with lighting, re-rendering, adjusting depth of field, re-rendering, etc... Around 7 or 8 hours, approximately?

If I would've had a more distinct idea what I wanted when I started out, I could've cut the time considerably, but I was having some fun with it. This was never meant to be a serious piece, just a way of having some fun with a Z-tool Ed put up on the boards. I guess I just took it a little further than I expected.

Try out the demo. You'll see what I mean. It IS a lot of fun. I don't think you can go wrong with Zbrush. But I AM a little biased. It kinda feels like it was designed for me, if that makes any sense. There's a growing list of others who share my fondness for this program.

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

[Dan Huff]

Bob C, gimme a day or so and I'll follow up on your question. I want to devote enough thought to it so that I don't shortchange either program.

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

[Dan Huff]

Thank you Earl and thank you Bob!

The answer to your question Bob is yes, absolutely. Once you snapshot the object, the tool is still active and you just drag your mouse or pen to recreate what you just snapshot as many times as you like. Then if you enter the edit mode before you snapshot it to the canvas, you can edit away to your heart's content, moving, scaling, rotating, colorizing, texturing,...the list goes on. And if you save the tool under different names as you go along, you can have different versions of it to be loaded up at any time during that session or any in the future.

And one other thing... Using a pressure-sensitive graphic pen like the Wacom Intuos or Graphire is the GREATEST! Not only for Zbrush, but Photoshop, XARA, Illustrator, and Painter do fantastically with it as well. Please forgive me if I'm saying something everybody already knows. I've only had mine a couple months and I can't figure out for the life of me why I waited so long to get one.

If you have any other questions that I can answer, please, just ask away. And get the darn demo! You'll get hooked too! And if I remember correctly, it doesn't put a bunch of junk in your registry like most programs do.

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

[Bob C.]

The last image you posted got me to look at the Zbrush web site. You have several amazing images there as Nikko!

I have never used a 3D program much at all and was considering TrueSpace but then Zbrush caught my attention. Priced about the same as I recall. I’m interested in your comments about the difference between Zbrush and other 3D programs. I don't have a 3D "history" to unlearn.

I was wondering if you could take the time to talk about the difference and why you like one over the other. I guess our own personal “style� and the way our brain is wired will influence which program suits us best, not to mention what we are trying to accomplish. Steep learning curve is “bad� and a intuitive interface is good. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] I mostly use Corel Draw Photo-Paint and I’m starting to use Xara (vector) now.

Bob C.

[This message was edited by Bob C. on July 14, 2001 at 14:27.]