When I ugrade hardware again in two years I will reposition myself for an Nvidia future and demo Mudbox 200? again. fair enuff. I hate picking the wrong hardware.
i made the switch to nvidia about 2 years ago and haven't looked back. but at the same time this is very much a case of "lol you run ATI? unlucky noob".
A. It’s a new app and we want to be positioned for the future
B. We talked with most major game and film studios in the US, Canada, UK, Japan and ALL used nearly the same Nvidia hardware which we support in Mudbox 2009. So we had to make the app work for them.
Mudbox does not solve world hunger but it’s does some fantastic things in the areas of painting and sculpting providing solutions that others currently don’t
Nice to hear from Dave here on polycount, I used to be on the mudbox forums alot but the area killed it a bit.
I dont really agree with the marketing strategy used by autodesk/mudbox stated here. I honestly thought all this hardware incompatability was a serious bug or something that needed to be patched. Making such specific higher end hardware requirements probably significantly decreases the target audience. This also doesnt make sense as mudbox's main competition Zbrush runs well on a large variety of machines, making mudbox seem unstable and a bad second choice, even if people have the correct hardware. The third issue I have with this sales strategy is that if the app wants to be "positioned for the future" then it will need to run on "the people of the futures" hardware and Im sorry to say it but in my opinion the "people of the future" are currently students and in my experience they dont usually have very good hardware so they wont want to use unstable mudbox and will choose tried and tested zbrush. Arguments about student piracy put aside students will one day be in the game or film industry and might never have used mudbox.
"it’s does some fantastic things in the areas of painting and sculpting providing solutions that others currently don’t"
anyone care to elaborate on these fantastic things? I like the painting tools, eg. specular painting and bump painting, what else? cause it really doesnt do alot of the fantastic things that its competition does(extract sub-objects, run on alot of computer hardware,zspheres,transpose etc)
That said, Im still a mudbox fan and thats why Im annoyed with this. If I can save up I will still try and get mb2009.
but its does some fantastic things in the areas of painting and sculpting providing solutions that others currently dont.
( setting aside for the moment that mudbox is essentially a non entity on any of the hardware i have access to ) the bottom line in response to that statement : remove mudbox from the market ? meh ! remove zbrush ? now you've got a massive hole. that might be a somewhat inflammatory remark but of course we're just sharing our opinions. i was very much looking forward to a bonafide alternative to zbrush but sadly. as it is. i can pretty much ignore mudbox for now
i'll be there in line to damn pixologic for the manner by which zbrush is organized / contained but even the most hardcore mudbox user must concede its wealth of tools and functionality. at this point in its development mudbox is still not bringing anything much more substantial than it's UI and readily familiar environment
food for thought : if zbrush were reskinned and offered in that familiar UI flavour and 3D paradigm. essentially levelling that aspect between them. where would mudbox stand by comparison ?
I'm glad the two apps are almost polar opposites pulling each other in the direction they need to go. At some point hopefully they'll be like 3dsmax and Maya, pretty much equal and its just a matter of which one you've used longer. But for now its heavily dependent on work flow and features.
Where I'm at we use Mudbox, its just easier to train people to use and we don't have a need for the "ba-zillion of extra features" zbrush has. Not to say they aren't useful, we just have a higher need for a friendly UI and basic sculpting toolset.
Wish list for Zbrush:
- Redesigned UI.
- Upgrade to 3D and full shader support.
- Maybe just strip down a bunch of the little used features and offer a Mudbox comparable version for cheaper.
Wish list for Mudbox:
- Transpose like features.
- Curves/guides that can be fixed to the mesh, not the viewport.
- I have a bunch more but I'm light on time...
-
Tried the trial, and so far I have two major issues with version 2009.
1) MB seems to "hang" for half a sec or so after each brush stroke, this seems to happen after the model passes a certain polycount..varies from model to model, but it starts somewhere near 1mil. I've seen others post about this problem too.
2) Weird shading artifacts when smooth shaded view is turned off. I know some people who prefer sculpting with it off, so this is a major bummer.
For those that are interested here's the QuickStart series that I've bene doing ..SO FAR, theres still plenty left to come and starting last week the high resolution 'From the Ground up' series debuted for free on the area. The Quickstart video are about an hour in total, with hours worth in the 'Ground Up' series thats coming.
If you need to get a hold of any of the files used of rsome of the tutorials such as the action file, special sphere or plane head over to the tutorial section of the area or my site which is www.dashdotslash.net
- Curves/guides that can be fixed to the mesh, not the viewport.
I'm not an expert or anything but I know in mudbox there is a feature to bookmark your current viewport position. So it makes using some of the guides and stencils a bit easier as you can move to check out what you did then move the viewer back to its previous setting.
I was very much looking forward to a bonafide alternative to Zbrush but, sadly, as it is, I can pretty much ignore Mudbox for now
McDonald's has better fries than Burger King, but nothing beats the Whopper. McDonald's menu as a whole is better than Burger King's (in both variety and taste versus like items), but they don't have any one menu item that is on par with the Whopper.
sorry perna. i'll clarify a little. and again to leave the disclaimer. each to his own and all that. . . far as i'm concerned mudbox is a feature barren landscape with a price tag all too knowingly cashing in on the fact that a lot of people just want to get away from zbrush. period. and are more than happy to give up the toolset there to do so
mudbox just doesn't do enough to be considered an indispensable tool in my opinion. and i'm not talking about retopo or rigging or dirty ol' zspheres. my apologies that i don't have the time to go through a tool by tool analysis / comparison of its shortcomings but the little things like :
proper sticky key masking ( freezing )
projection tools to allow the flexibility of moving back and forth with topo edits
all the viewport tricks zb has that really speed up workflow ( navigation notwithstanding )
- single click hide / show polygroups
- one action marquee isolation / hiding
etc. little things
far as i can tell mb2 offers no improvements to the workflow over mb1. and ( apart from painting ) one major productivity tool included ( the steady stroke / lazy mouse thing ). so ultimately it becomes a question of which way do you go ? : feature rich with all the quirks ( zb ). or feature poor yet straightforward ( mb )
for me the feature poor kit is the more frustrating. looking nervously forward to mudbox 2010
For those that are interested here's the QuickStart series that I've bene doing ..SO FAR, theres still plenty left to come and starting last week the high resolution 'From the Ground up' series debuted for free on the area. The Quickstart video are about an hour in total, with hours worth in the 'Ground Up' series thats coming.
If you need to get a hold of any of the files used of rsome of the tutorials such as the action file, special sphere or plane head over to the tutorial section of the area or my site which is www.dashdotslash.net
and neither with a decent vege burger option. motherfuckers !
there's an analogy in there somewhere
Right, you gotta go to Backyard Burgers for the veggie. Mmmm.
Honestly, it seems like comparing Zbrush and Mudbox is very akin to comparing apples and oranges. Sure, they're similar, but they're obviously not swappable. Maybe one isn't any better than the other overall, and they're just similar apps w/ different company goals.
Agh I *really need a merge layers option. recreating layers in photoshop with appropriate transparencies and merging is a royal pain in the ass. I hope that's on the fix list
Agreed, Rooster. I was really to see Colour and Sculpting layers were treated so differently. Not only is it annoying because I need that functionality, the two different ways of dealing with layers are also confusing, which I would think is against the Mudbox 'idea'.
Just want to say this here, not being able to open mudv1 files in 2009 is just ridiculous, now i have to do a bunch of bullshit to get my old models into the new version? Terrible. And what if that old model didnt have proper uvs? No real way to do it then right?
I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens with Zbrush 3.5. It's supposed to be out this year, and it's another free upgrade for existing users.
This puts the Pixologic folks in an interesting situation - they've already got an established userbase, so whilst no doubt they are striving to make their software as good as it can be, they can provide *just enough* new features and evolution to make people decide that it's not worth paying to switch to Mudbox.
Of course, they could drop a motherload of new features, and the improved UI and scene management that Pern pointed out, and they release that as a free upgrade then Mudbox will have a lot of work to do.
I've not used the newer Mubox, but I think we're getting a few demo licenses in to play with shortly.
haha, autodesk need to do something about their dev practices.. hoohoo..
no seriously, the paint functions are awesome but simultaneously feel unfinished. If the goal was to make it so you didn't have to touch photoshop, or you could texture purely in mudbox, the two big absences are merge layers and blur/smudge. everyone at work who sees me using the demo and painting asks me if you can smudge, and I say, eerrrrr no. They don't ask about the layers because- well it would be ridiculous to export every layer and note down the transparency and then re-assemble and merge them in photoshop.
I'm not talking about next gen assets, I'm talking about using mudbox as a new way of working on current gen/rapid prototype work.. maybe thats too niche to listen to. I do get some dodgy artifacts on anything but a 32 bit image, and smudge would fix em. but maybe thats an arguement against the artifacts not for smudge. Its a tool I use anyways.
if you set the brush to large spacing don't you essentially have a stamp?
Not to come across as the Autodesk defense force here, but the issue at hand I think is since autodesk is a publicly traded company the MB 2009 team has to adhere to pretty strict release dates for Mudbox to which were initially told to the shareholders. I'm fairly sure the development team wasn't scheming evil plans to screw the userbase or were flat out lazy; that's just how software development works at a giant company.
Of course this doesn't make it excusable, but just something to keep in mind. The best thing right now is just to wait for the fixes to be released. I think MB2009 is a great app with massive future potential, I see great work being made with it all the time, but development for it is just getting more.. err complicated.
well put- agree 100%
that occlusion mapping thing pior mentioned also sounds very handy now I think about it, but the current workaround is prohibitive
I couldn't agree more, Per. Although I wouldn't say 'straightforward to develop', mostly because I don't know enough about programming to do so, the fact remains that these are things you'd expect to see, if they're really catering to a professional audience. The workarounds they provide as being 'almost as good' are shockingly condescending, and make me lose respect for them as developers. It's one thing to say 'yeah, we haven't got that yet, but here's a workaround... sorry'. It's quite another to pretend it's a feature.
if I want to create a paint layer underneath the current one, am I correct in thinking you have to export the current layer, delete it, create a new layer, and then import the first layer?
so how does it work, can i project and it updates the texture and vice versa? that'd be sooo awesome, just bought me deeppaint again as i don't like bodypaint, and zbrush and mudbox are somewhat sucky when it goes to the ps connection
I think for me this update was more along the lines of what I was expecting last year when mudbox was already relatively late with the update and the acquisition was the biggest news. I definitely expected more paint features than what is there now. The only thing really delivered was the sculpting performance, which again, was expected more or less last year. People were hoping for some kind of release announcement around siggraph - late fall.
I'm rather unbiased towards software and really don't care about who wins any software wars (bs created by fanatical users for the most part). I buy and use whatever suits my needs whenever. If that means buying apps that overlap in functionality and using them for only 1 or 2 features, that's fine, so long as those features really stand out for me. Painting was the big expectation for MB2009 on my part and I don't quite see it as being useful to me yet. I'm still using modo 203 for touch ups and seams as it can still handle that stuff ok (didn't see 301 as a worthwhile update either). I don't need to paint on multi million polygon meshes, and if I do, polypainting in zb still works fine.
The performance increase in mudbox is awesome, and sculpting in general is great but I think I stated before that it wouldn't be enough for me to upgrade my personal copy. I have no problems using zbrush for sculpting so I'll probably stick with that. I'm turning my attention towards 3dcoat now, mostly for the impending per-pixel painting features in the upcoming 3.0 update, and playing around with the volumetric sculpting features in the alpha releases in the meantime. I'll wait and see what happens with mudbox on the painting side before upgrading though. I'm sure it will get there. It's just not there for me yet with this release.
I've heard nothing but negative info on CS4 for 3d painting, as well as some crazy performance issues. On the fence for that upgrade too till I see more info that tells me it's worthwhile or try the demo.
i can't give anything too informative as i don't actually have the software. just got a 20 minute doodle with it.
i actually found it really easy though. with mudbox, right now, i'm like "ok so it's ANOTHER 3d app i have to learn, and i have to learn the workarounds for..."
with CS4, it's the same old photoshop, just with a new shiney. all the painting tools work the same way on the mesh as they do on a canvas, so the transition just seems really smooth.
if and when i get a longer go, i'll catalogue some pros and cons and start a new thread. sorry for hijacking this one
Weird, the CS4 viewport navigation and object rotation/manipulation seems "custom" and something Adobe just pulled out of their asses and made up as they went.
Unlike Mudbox which uses widely adopted "default" viewport controls.
Gwot beat me to 3D Coat. We bought licenses at work, and I'll buy one for home next month now that my demo version has run out.
It doesn't paint as well as photoshop, it doesn't sculpt as well as Zbrush, and the UI is bobbins - but all developers should take note not only of it's features, but it rapid development pace.
perna: It's still quirky, but Andrew seems to be opening up to some UI streamlining ideas now that the software is attracting more industry artists. He seems to want to make the software work the way everyone else wants it to so he's really open to suggestions. Like Rick said the development pace is pretty crazy. He'll add something overnight just to try it out if the idea is good. From there the users have full input on how to refine it.
I bought a license mostly out of curiosity as the listed features for 3.0 were quite impressive. Right now the painting works more like it does in zbrush, meaning you need a denser mesh to get good results. But he has indicated that will change in 3.0. The volumetric sculpting shows some real potential. It's a really strange feeling being able to just add volume where you need it and disregard polygons altogether. The retopo tools are also badass. They just need to be streamlined within the UI so you can get a better flow when working with them.
I'm not using it for any of my studio work yet though so take that for whatever it's worth.
Rick: that doesn't last forever, though. Eventually, all development slows down a lot. I've used a lot of programs (audio ones, mostly) that were developed at breakneck speeds, and then slowed down to a crawl when the features had to be polished, rather than new ones being added.
Having said that, 3d coat's something I keep trying every now and then, but never fully commited to, but definitely want to at some point
edit: Also, Per's suggestion for me picking up coding is a frightening one, heh. I have trouble keying in a phone-number that's right in front of me, so if any maths are involved, consider me a lost cause.
I have heard a lot about defficiencies in mudbox's paint tools. How does Maxon's Bodypaint stand up as a paint tool? It has tighter intergration with Photoshop now.
Now that I have started an actual project with Mudbox 2009 I still think the software is great, when its actually working...
I happily use Bodypaint so the painting features of Mudbox 2009 was something I didn't really care about, therefore that's not an issue. The main thing I wanted in mudbox 2009 was simply to take full advantage of my 8 gigs of ram and vista 64 bit OS. It appears they did this, but at the cost of stability. Right now, the only thing in my rig that is even remotely outdated is the fact that I have a 8800GT video card, so they certainly can't say its my hardwares fault, or that my hardware is outdated.
Here's what I wish they would fix:
-When the program crashes like it often does for me, for Christ sake, give me a chance to save like 3ds max does.
-You should be able to SAVE and LOAD custom keyboard shortcuts.
-When you make your own shortcuts, they should be properly listed in the menus. Right now, it still shows the defaults in the menus, even though they have been overridden and won't actually work.
-Maybe they have a solution, but it would be nice to have a bounding box or some other option so when you select your mesh you don't have to wait so long.
That's it for now, the main problem for me is stability. I save often, but sometimes I have to do little tricks I figured out to make the program NOT crash. Like, it loves to crash right after I import an .obj. But if I lock the mesh I imported right away, and then unlock it, Mudbox doesn't crash. I think that's pretty ridiculous really that I have to resort to these kind of workarounds.
I'm going to go to nvidias website and see if there are any updates again. If anyone knows of any ways that I might be able to make Mudbox2009 more stable, please share them!
[Edit] Oh yeah, and sometimes when you unlock something the dark color you get when something is locked doesn't go away. That's really annoying too. The work around for this I found was to select and deselect the problem mesh.
Replies
When I ugrade hardware again in two years I will reposition myself for an Nvidia future and demo Mudbox 200? again. fair enuff. I hate picking the wrong hardware.
Nice to hear from Dave here on polycount, I used to be on the mudbox forums alot but the area killed it a bit.
I dont really agree with the marketing strategy used by autodesk/mudbox stated here. I honestly thought all this hardware incompatability was a serious bug or something that needed to be patched. Making such specific higher end hardware requirements probably significantly decreases the target audience. This also doesnt make sense as mudbox's main competition Zbrush runs well on a large variety of machines, making mudbox seem unstable and a bad second choice, even if people have the correct hardware. The third issue I have with this sales strategy is that if the app wants to be "positioned for the future" then it will need to run on "the people of the futures" hardware and Im sorry to say it but in my opinion the "people of the future" are currently students and in my experience they dont usually have very good hardware so they wont want to use unstable mudbox and will choose tried and tested zbrush. Arguments about student piracy put aside students will one day be in the game or film industry and might never have used mudbox.
"it’s does some fantastic things in the areas of painting and sculpting providing solutions that others currently don’t"
anyone care to elaborate on these fantastic things? I like the painting tools, eg. specular painting and bump painting, what else? cause it really doesnt do alot of the fantastic things that its competition does(extract sub-objects, run on alot of computer hardware,zspheres,transpose etc)
That said, Im still a mudbox fan and thats why Im annoyed with this. If I can save up I will still try and get mb2009.
( setting aside for the moment that mudbox is essentially a non entity on any of the hardware i have access to ) the bottom line in response to that statement : remove mudbox from the market ? meh ! remove zbrush ? now you've got a massive hole. that might be a somewhat inflammatory remark but of course we're just sharing our opinions. i was very much looking forward to a bonafide alternative to zbrush but sadly. as it is. i can pretty much ignore mudbox for now
i'll be there in line to damn pixologic for the manner by which zbrush is organized / contained but even the most hardcore mudbox user must concede its wealth of tools and functionality. at this point in its development mudbox is still not bringing anything much more substantial than it's UI and readily familiar environment
food for thought : if zbrush were reskinned and offered in that familiar UI flavour and 3D paradigm. essentially levelling that aspect between them. where would mudbox stand by comparison ?
Where I'm at we use Mudbox, its just easier to train people to use and we don't have a need for the "ba-zillion of extra features" zbrush has. Not to say they aren't useful, we just have a higher need for a friendly UI and basic sculpting toolset.
Wish list for Zbrush:
- Redesigned UI.
- Upgrade to 3D and full shader support.
- Maybe just strip down a bunch of the little used features and offer a Mudbox comparable version for cheaper.
Wish list for Mudbox:
- Transpose like features.
- Curves/guides that can be fixed to the mesh, not the viewport.
- I have a bunch more but I'm light on time...
-
1) MB seems to "hang" for half a sec or so after each brush stroke, this seems to happen after the model passes a certain polycount..varies from model to model, but it starts somewhere near 1mil. I've seen others post about this problem too.
2) Weird shading artifacts when smooth shaded view is turned off. I know some people who prefer sculpting with it off, so this is a major bummer.
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: Tubes and Rake brushes
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: Image based lighting (HDRI)
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: preparing photos for projection in Mudbox 2009
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: Painting HDRI's in Mudbox 2009
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: Tileable textures and displacemnt maps
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: Sculpting Trick
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart series: Use all your Photoshop brushes in Mudbox 2009
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart Series: Zbrush to Mudbox 2009 Total Conversion video
Mudbox 2009 Quickstart Series: Projecting Retopped Meshes and UV's
For those that are interested here's the QuickStart series that I've bene doing ..SO FAR, theres still plenty left to come and starting last week the high resolution 'From the Ground up' series debuted for free on the area. The Quickstart video are about an hour in total, with hours worth in the 'Ground Up' series thats coming.
If you need to get a hold of any of the files used of rsome of the tutorials such as the action file, special sphere or plane head over to the tutorial section of the area or my site which is www.dashdotslash.net
Enjoy
Wayne...
I'm not an expert or anything but I know in mudbox there is a feature to bookmark your current viewport position. So it makes using some of the guides and stencils a bit easier as you can move to check out what you did then move the viewer back to its previous setting.
McDonald's has better fries than Burger King, but nothing beats the Whopper. McDonald's menu as a whole is better than Burger King's (in both variety and taste versus like items), but they don't have any one menu item that is on par with the Whopper.
Oh, wait, wrong thread.
mudbox just doesn't do enough to be considered an indispensable tool in my opinion. and i'm not talking about retopo or rigging or dirty ol' zspheres. my apologies that i don't have the time to go through a tool by tool analysis / comparison of its shortcomings but the little things like :
proper sticky key masking ( freezing )
projection tools to allow the flexibility of moving back and forth with topo edits
all the viewport tricks zb has that really speed up workflow ( navigation notwithstanding )
- single click hide / show polygroups
- one action marquee isolation / hiding
etc. little things
far as i can tell mb2 offers no improvements to the workflow over mb1. and ( apart from painting ) one major productivity tool included ( the steady stroke / lazy mouse thing ). so ultimately it becomes a question of which way do you go ? : feature rich with all the quirks ( zb ). or feature poor yet straightforward ( mb )
for me the feature poor kit is the more frustrating. looking nervously forward to mudbox 2010
Good stuff.
and neither with a decent vege burger option. motherfuckers !
there's an analogy in there somewhere
Right, you gotta go to Backyard Burgers for the veggie. Mmmm.
Honestly, it seems like comparing Zbrush and Mudbox is very akin to comparing apples and oranges. Sure, they're similar, but they're obviously not swappable. Maybe one isn't any better than the other overall, and they're just similar apps w/ different company goals.
This puts the Pixologic folks in an interesting situation - they've already got an established userbase, so whilst no doubt they are striving to make their software as good as it can be, they can provide *just enough* new features and evolution to make people decide that it's not worth paying to switch to Mudbox.
Of course, they could drop a motherload of new features, and the improved UI and scene management that Pern pointed out, and they release that as a free upgrade then Mudbox will have a lot of work to do.
I've not used the newer Mubox, but I think we're getting a few demo licenses in to play with shortly.
no seriously, the paint functions are awesome but simultaneously feel unfinished. If the goal was to make it so you didn't have to touch photoshop, or you could texture purely in mudbox, the two big absences are merge layers and blur/smudge. everyone at work who sees me using the demo and painting asks me if you can smudge, and I say, eerrrrr no. They don't ask about the layers because- well it would be ridiculous to export every layer and note down the transparency and then re-assemble and merge them in photoshop.
if you set the brush to large spacing don't you essentially have a stamp?
Of course this doesn't make it excusable, but just something to keep in mind. The best thing right now is just to wait for the fixes to be released. I think MB2009 is a great app with massive future potential, I see great work being made with it all the time, but development for it is just getting more.. err complicated.
that occlusion mapping thing pior mentioned also sounds very handy now I think about it, but the current workaround is prohibitive
screw mudbox or zbrush, just throw your mesh into photoshop from now on.
the bump map editor was just sick O_O
I'm rather unbiased towards software and really don't care about who wins any software wars (bs created by fanatical users for the most part). I buy and use whatever suits my needs whenever. If that means buying apps that overlap in functionality and using them for only 1 or 2 features, that's fine, so long as those features really stand out for me. Painting was the big expectation for MB2009 on my part and I don't quite see it as being useful to me yet. I'm still using modo 203 for touch ups and seams as it can still handle that stuff ok (didn't see 301 as a worthwhile update either). I don't need to paint on multi million polygon meshes, and if I do, polypainting in zb still works fine.
The performance increase in mudbox is awesome, and sculpting in general is great but I think I stated before that it wouldn't be enough for me to upgrade my personal copy. I have no problems using zbrush for sculpting so I'll probably stick with that. I'm turning my attention towards 3dcoat now, mostly for the impending per-pixel painting features in the upcoming 3.0 update, and playing around with the volumetric sculpting features in the alpha releases in the meantime. I'll wait and see what happens with mudbox on the painting side before upgrading though. I'm sure it will get there. It's just not there for me yet with this release.
I've heard nothing but negative info on CS4 for 3d painting, as well as some crazy performance issues. On the fence for that upgrade too till I see more info that tells me it's worthwhile or try the demo.
i actually found it really easy though. with mudbox, right now, i'm like "ok so it's ANOTHER 3d app i have to learn, and i have to learn the workarounds for..."
with CS4, it's the same old photoshop, just with a new shiney. all the painting tools work the same way on the mesh as they do on a canvas, so the transition just seems really smooth.
if and when i get a longer go, i'll catalogue some pros and cons and start a new thread. sorry for hijacking this one
Unlike Mudbox which uses widely adopted "default" viewport controls.
It doesn't paint as well as photoshop, it doesn't sculpt as well as Zbrush, and the UI is bobbins - but all developers should take note not only of it's features, but it rapid development pace.
I bought a license mostly out of curiosity as the listed features for 3.0 were quite impressive. Right now the painting works more like it does in zbrush, meaning you need a denser mesh to get good results. But he has indicated that will change in 3.0. The volumetric sculpting shows some real potential. It's a really strange feeling being able to just add volume where you need it and disregard polygons altogether. The retopo tools are also badass. They just need to be streamlined within the UI so you can get a better flow when working with them.
I'm not using it for any of my studio work yet though so take that for whatever it's worth.
Anyway, I digress from the topic, sorry.
Having said that, 3d coat's something I keep trying every now and then, but never fully commited to, but definitely want to at some point
edit: Also, Per's suggestion for me picking up coding is a frightening one, heh. I have trouble keying in a phone-number that's right in front of me, so if any maths are involved, consider me a lost cause.
I happily use Bodypaint so the painting features of Mudbox 2009 was something I didn't really care about, therefore that's not an issue. The main thing I wanted in mudbox 2009 was simply to take full advantage of my 8 gigs of ram and vista 64 bit OS. It appears they did this, but at the cost of stability. Right now, the only thing in my rig that is even remotely outdated is the fact that I have a 8800GT video card, so they certainly can't say its my hardwares fault, or that my hardware is outdated.
Here's what I wish they would fix:
-When the program crashes like it often does for me, for Christ sake, give me a chance to save like 3ds max does.
-You should be able to SAVE and LOAD custom keyboard shortcuts.
-When you make your own shortcuts, they should be properly listed in the menus. Right now, it still shows the defaults in the menus, even though they have been overridden and won't actually work.
-Maybe they have a solution, but it would be nice to have a bounding box or some other option so when you select your mesh you don't have to wait so long.
That's it for now, the main problem for me is stability. I save often, but sometimes I have to do little tricks I figured out to make the program NOT crash. Like, it loves to crash right after I import an .obj. But if I lock the mesh I imported right away, and then unlock it, Mudbox doesn't crash. I think that's pretty ridiculous really that I have to resort to these kind of workarounds.
I'm going to go to nvidias website and see if there are any updates again. If anyone knows of any ways that I might be able to make Mudbox2009 more stable, please share them!
[Edit] Oh yeah, and sometimes when you unlock something the dark color you get when something is locked doesn't go away. That's really annoying too. The work around for this I found was to select and deselect the problem mesh.
edit: it appears that the old plugin doesnt just work with 64bit version, my bad.