Zbrush 2021 Sneak Preview

TeZzy

Zbrush 2021 update looks like it will have some nice updates and features. Looking forward to this release!

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KITv9zJJC8

thomasp

Thanks for posting that! Cloth brush looks very interesting to me. Tried to use and failed at the one in Blender, here's hoping ZBrush's solution enables me to go back to working like a sculptor, not a tailor.

Any ETA on the release? Not really on top of this stuff: only installed 2020.1.4 the other week...

TeZzy

I didn't see a mention of any release date but it will be another free update for existing users. Yay!

https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/sneak-peek-zbrush-2021/377830

oglu

"With great power comes great responsibility"
I see a lot of cloth done in 5min on Artstation. 

thomasp

Hmmm, you'd rather go back to a CGTalk style committee of moderators who used to greenlight your gallery postings before they were made public?

oglu

Definitely not. But the pubilc opinnion how things gets done in production is already off.

CheeseOnToast

Looks like a great update. There's usually some bit of random deadweight in a Zbrush update (paintstop anyone?), but this all looks useful. It's a small thing, but it looks like you'll be able to extrude open edges with zmodeller which means less dicking around in other apps or using convoluted workarounds.

Alex_J

cloth looks cool. would be nice to cut marvelous designer out of the workflow, but I guess we'll see how how feasible that really is. One great thing about MD is it gives you great UV's as well, in addition to being able to reuse the pattern easily across multiple models.

Ruz

does it has a proper cloth sim or jsut a cloth brush?

TeZzy

Looks like both based on what is shown. 

@Alex Javor : I think MD will still offer a certain level of control that Zbrush won't be providing (at least based on the video). But having the ability to stay inside Zbrush for a quick sim will be real nice and give people less of a reason use MD, especially now that they are going subscription only from version 10 onwards.

Ruz

well looks fine for thoise simple sheet wrapping aorund balls, but I wonder how it will deal with a jacket for example. hope you get a nice looking bunch of creases. have to wait and see

thomasp

ZBrush 2021 is now available for download. Totally missed that. Cloth stuff at a glance looks really nice and useful so far, offering both simulation and cloth brushes. Works well with objects created inside ZB but will have to test this with production meshes later to see if it can replace MD completely for me.

CheeseOnToast

Prepare for disappointment. It might be useful for some simple draped stuff, but I'm not getting anything like a decent result for clothing in the 3 or so hours I've spent tinkering with it. Feels like a foundation for something more complete further down the line. It's possible there's some workflow tricks to make it behave better, but I haven't found them yet.

Ruz

I figured that would be the case tbh, not even downloaded it yet

zachagreg

CheeseOnToast said:

Prepare for disappointment. It might be useful for some simple draped stuff, but I'm not getting anything like a decent result for clothing in the 3 or so hours I've spent tinkering with it. Feels like a foundation for something more complete further down the line. It's possible there's some workflow tricks to make it behave better, but I haven't found them yet.

In the 3 hours you spent my biggest excitement about it was the performance improvements they mentioned. Are those noticeable at all?

CheeseOnToast

I didn't really test that, but I did notice using a move brush on a dense mesh was much more responsive.

thomasp

CheeseOnToast said:

Prepare for disappointment. It might be useful for some simple draped stuff, but I'm not getting anything like a decent result for clothing in the 3 or so hours I've spent tinkering with it. Feels like a foundation for something more complete further down the line. It's possible there's some workflow tricks to make it behave better, but I haven't found them yet.

Yeah, looks like you are spot on with your assessment. These brushes actually seem to make more sense to generally slide one surface over another like a fancy shrinkwrap. The folds themselves ... there don't seem to be material presets (or properties) for different types of cloth so all I can manage is a very uniform looking kind of fold that don't address the reason for using clothsim in the first place. Perhaps the brushes for detailing - but I prefer my selfmade/MD-sourced fold displacement alphas for that. Click-drag-done.

Anyway, having quite a few odd crashes when loading or appending tools (Mac version). Not too unexpected for a first release I suppose. Perhaps time to fill out some bug reports.

CheeseOnToast

My biggest issue is that storing a morph target before simming doesn't properly do what it's supposed to , i.e. preserve the volume of the cloth. It works to some extent when using the cloth brushes, although you can still stretch cloth "out of bounds" quite easily. Hitting the Run Simulation button just results in a puddle on the floor, seemingly ignoring the original volume.

I think what might be happening under the hood is that the overall volume is being preserved, but individual polygons are allowed to stretch as much as they like, without any constraints.

What I was hoping for was a system where I could extract some clothing from a base mesh, clean it up with zremeshing, make it a bit looser then sim it. Next, go on to tweak it with brushes, kind of like tugging on the mesh in Marvelous but with more direct control. Zbrush's easy access to artist controlled masking and polygroups could make the whole process really nice. Oh well, maybe we'll get that later on.

For what it's worth, the "firmness" slider at the top of the dynamics panel broadly controls the fabric type. Lower numbers = tighter folds.

Ruz

watched a few videos on the cloth stuff and the sim seems quite fast but unfortunately the look of the cloth does not seem at all natural.

loathe to download it as the previous update was so laggy i had to renstall the previous version

CheeseOnToast

I have 2021 and 2020.1 installed at the same time. It doesn't use up an activation, apparently. I didn't even see the activation screen on startup - it just worked.

Ruz

Cool, will look at that. don't know what ws up with 2020.1 , lagged like hell when zooming in/panning mainly

thomasp

I saw this in another forum - perhaps related to the lag? Seems like they changed something regarding Windows Ink in 2020.

You could try panning and zooming with the mouse first to see if lag occurs.

Here’s what’s changed in 2021.1:

ADDED:
Preferences >> Tablet >> Tablet Driver API to determine how ZBrush works with Windows Ink, affecting performance when using a tablet on Windows. If you experience lag issues when interacting with models, trying one of these other settings should resolve them.

There are 3 options:

• WinTab (default mode): Will not handle Windows Ink. This will operate like it did in ZBrush 2019.
• Stylus: Handles Windows Ink the same way it did in 2020.1.4.
• WM_Event: Handles Windows Ink the same way it did in 2021.

Ruz

Cheers thomasp, will have a look at that.