ZBrush 4R2b
interpolator
via http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?164835-FiberMesh-Preview
Fiber Mesh looks really cool!
Hi,
I am pleased to announce the official launch date for ZBrush 4R2b has been scheduled for January 23th, 2012.
ZBrush 4R2b will be released as a patch update to version 4R2, and is free of charge to all ZBrush registered users.
With each new release of ZBrush, we introduce new features that we hope will enable you to further explore your creativity while having a lot of fun in the process.
Originally ZBrush 4R2b was scheduled to be released in December and focus on fixing previously reported problems. Not fully satisfied with this original intent, we could not resist adding new and exciting features. FiberMesh is one of these features, which will have a significant impact on your ZBrush creations.
FiberMesh will enable you to easily and quickly create hair and other fibers. FiberMesh will create a fully sculptable PolyMesh 3D object.
The FiberMesh density can range from few polygons to several millions of polygons and it may also be exported, just like any other PolyMesh3D.
When you are done shaping and sculpting, Best-Preview-Render (BPR) will help you put the final shine on your creations
In my next post, NoiseMaker will be previewed. NoiseMaker is another powerful feature that will be included in Z4R2b. It will certainly prove that at times, a lot of noise can be a good thing
Thanks for all the amazing contributions to ZBrushCentral throughout 2011.
On behalf of the entire Pixologic Team, have a happy and joyous holiday.
May all your travels be safe.
See you all in 2012!
Have fun ZBrushing!
-Pixolator
Fiber Mesh looks really cool!
Replies
o.o
This is getting to the level where we can do anything in zbrush without going out of it. But the problem will occur when we would want to transfer high poly mesh with hair in to low poly. It will be as hard as right now, because we still have to make planes and all.
It looks like it'll be fun to block out hair and do detail sculpts with it, not sure what else.
don't think I'd ever use it (fibre mesh) at all tbh, results aren't all that appealing and you can get nicer results by sculpting out of solid forms or throwing poly planes around imo...
have been thinking about switching over to mudbox lately (they have an actual camera) but plain sculpting in zb is still the best for me at least *shrugs*
If we can do that, and our strokes continue to define the flow of the hair . . . that could be a really nice time saver. Or at the least something solid to base further hand sculpted shapes
Not sure how this could be used in production though.
Looks interesting though, really curious to see what kind of bakes you can get with this, could be a great initial base to work with. And it does seem alot more interactive than any other hair system I've seen up till now.
I'm sure that's there.
Like many others, this didn't exactly set my world on fire. But it will definitely be very beneficial to some I would imagine.
Though seems pretty real. If those hair are grouped in patches where you actually control a curve to from them, then you can automatically place cards along that at adjustable intervals.
Making volumetric hairmesh and covering it with planes is really just an old hack and if realtime cg pretends to move towards realism then someday we'll have to have hair that actually grow out of one's head. Thought with modern technology it still would be too overdraw intense.
I wonder if hair can be done as a post process shader.
agreed.
this look like it would be handy for grass and maybe some sparse hairs. and its always nice to have. there is a bunch of uses. but for hair its not going to obsolete shave any time soon. or some of the other solutions. i just don't see the control you need and grooming tools.
i hope they do some stability updates for dynamesh. i had to many crashes to make it workable atm.
It might have been wonderfully helpful a month ago for a fur collar I had to make but like Swizzle say's, not the best examples to use.... at least not if they hadn't used such awesome music....
Not sure if serious..
The foliage stuff looks like a good as well. Seconded the notion of a followup tool that helps ease the pain of baking these details for maps and game use.
yea... cause up untill this theres never been ways to make hair just like this.. or better than this with other programs.
i cant se how this we even have a moderate effect on hair in video games.
Agreed, while it looks cool, I just don't think it will be usefull anywhere.. The hair plugins for Max and Maya are much more powerfull for pre-rendered stuff, and in game art hair planes just seems much more efficient.
For showcase, it may be useful. For low poly game models, not very so. It is going to be really damn hard exporting the hair details.
But lets see what this release turns out to be.
So if nothing else, I hope to get more stability out of it.
The hair stuff is simply yet another useless feature I'll be ignoring.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?165512
I jumped right into r2 and had major major stability issues. Thing would crash every 3-5 minutes without fail, no matter what I was doing. This r2b update seems to have fixed a lot of that. Although I still get the occasional crash.
If stability is fine, and you don't need the new features, just hold off on upgrading I say.
Oh, one cool thing I discovered, you can dynamesh a fibermesh subtool. It's a pretty interesting way to generate low rez hair. I want to do a quick test of making some hair, dynameshing it, uving the dynamesh, and attempting to do a normal bake of the full fibermesh onto the low res dynamesh.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?165601
otherwise i'll probably wait till we upgrade at work.
Thank god. R2b is basically unusable because of this issue, it was present in ZB4R2 but this mini update made it worse.
It's so weird how that stuff works with zBrush. It seems everyone has different types of problems, and there's rarely overlap. I've seen machines at work where R2 basically reduced their stability to nothing, and yet others where it was fine. People report all sorts of weird issues that only happen to a certain group and not others.
You'd think that a problem would show itself throughout the entire zBrush user-base.