I'm curious who here actually uses Zbrush for hard surfaces. Some of the new features recently added in 3.5 make it much easier to create hard surfaces from scratch, but I don't see too many people using this work flow.
I find Zbrush (and now mudbox does it rather well too!) is great for making bio-mechanical stuff. Hard edges on nicely curved surfaces. But when it comes to things like engines or cars or guns and etc, modelling is definitely the way to go. That's my personal opinion though!
Ive seen some amazing examples of people sculpting out in zbrush, retopologizing in another program for for sub-d. I think the main advantage is being able to try out new forms quickly with sculpting, before comitting the time with modeling them
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Nothing beats good old sub-d modeling. You have a lot of control, the only downsize is it's time consuming.
good example here http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65018
Also, anyone know of any good hardsurface sculpting tutorials?