ZBrush 3 woes.

ebagg

Well, I love ZBrush 3, I was sculpting gleefully away at work. Then I look for ZMapper....NO ZMAPPER!??! I was promised goddamn Zmapper 3! Maybe my other favorite program, ZApplink will have been updated. NOPE! And the new NormalMap tab doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. Way too fuck over my pipeline ZB3!!

Joseph Silverman

I think someone mentioned both are to be implemented in the not too distant future. Wouldn't know really, new to Zbrush, myself. Sorry to hear it's messing with your workflow, though.

ebagg

Yea, sorry for the somewhat bitchy tone of my post there. It's a situation akin to getting a great toy you've been looking forward to, and then not being able to get the batteries to use it until some time in the future. Zmapper is the only option for normal mapping in zbrush, and ZApplink is essential for cleaning up texture seams. In all of Pixologic's preview statements, they say the latest versions are to be expected, turns out we have to wait.

Ruz

Yeah thats bad new. I will stick to zbrush 2 for a while

Asmuel

They were always plugins so its no surprise. Why dont you import into ZB2 and use them in there? They just generate texture info so you dont need every sub-d level.

conte

Asmuel right, don't cry.

Mongrelman

Just spent awhile doing some scupting in it (had been focusing on trying retopologising before). Got to say I really prefer the feel of sclupting now. It no longer feels like you are spraying a strip of clay onto the model where you can clearly see it unless you smooth after (even when you tweak the curve settings). Now you sclupt and it pushes up in a very natural way that is smoother and just feels much better.

PolyHertz

Agreed, it does feel much more natural now then before. The layers and new brush types are welcome additions as well.

That said, it does (as ebagg found) have some missing features that people were expecting to be included. Asside from that, their are some bugs to be worked out.

Asside from the fact that sometimes it seems to want to crash repeatedly, and others be more stable then even makes sense, some major core functions seem to be broken. For example, why is it that any obj it exports cant be above roughly 10,000 polys or it will crash 3dsmax durring import? Not being able to take any models out of zb3 is a pretty big deal, especialy when you cant make your n-maps in it yet.

As of right now due to those two things zb3 is unusable for game art (or much else other then making nice pictures).

Daz

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why is it that any obj it exports cant be above roughly 10,000 polys or it will crash 3dsmax durring import?

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You don't think that perhaps its fair to say that thats a Max issue, or something else specific to your personal setup, and not a Zbrush one? I get extremely dense meshes out of Zbrush2 no problem all the time. If outputted .obj's are somehow now more bloated, then obviously that's a pretty big deal. But I can't think why they would be. There is only so much info that an .obj file is capable of storing and its pretty much just a list of verts, normals, texture coordinates and faces.

MoP

Yeah I was gonna say, it's much more likely to be some settings which are set incorrectly than a bug with the whole thing. Try checking your ZBrush OBJ export options, and also your Max import options.

kyphur

Yeah, I was a little upset when I started using zbrush3 and noticed those features omitted. Going back to the zbrush roadmap I saw this:

Look forward to:

HD Exporter Geometry into Displacements maps
Multi Displacement 3
ZMapper 3
ZAppLink 3
Arbitrary mesh projection & topology.
Scripted workflow-based 'smart' UI and Hotkey manager.
and more...

Happy ZBrushing!


I was like, "...greeeeeaaaat..."

Haven't gotten to try exporting the obj's yet from zbrush here at work due to other priorities. Will try the obj from the house tonight when I have time.

ebagg

Subtools are awesome, but this means if I want to export and import into ZB2 I either have to do so for both the highest and lowest subd level of each tool or export the whole thing, which I dread, with the amount of polys the characters are, we're looking at a file that is a gig.

tacit math

gotta bring the comedy and say : almost feels like this release was rushed

PolyHertz

You were right daz and mop, I was being unfair laying the blame on zb3 like that. Turns out it was my settings (Unify has to be turned off when importing). You win this round pixologic, but ill get you next time!

As for obj sizes, they're actualy considerably smaller. I took a mesh made up of 38912 polys and exported it from zb2 with the resulting file being 6.18mb. Then exported a copy from zb3 of the same model and it came out at 2.11mb. Iow, at least in this particular test zb3 objs were roughly 1/3 the size of zb2 ones.

Mongrelman

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gotta bring the comedy and say : almost feels like this release was rushed

[/ QUOTE ]

Almost? :P

Also note you no longer need to drop to the lowest subd level before saving the tool for smaller file size. It seems to save it that way automatically.

I'm hoping there is an update soon to fix the stability issues, I've had this crash more times in the past few days than Z2 in the two years I've had it (or close enough anyway).