@malcolm, If your artists need to learn the basics of ZBrush then I would recommend going with the ZBrush 3.5 Intro DVD as it covers all the basics related to starting to sculpt and learning the ins and outs of navigation etc. It covers things like the brushes, documents, the canvas, masking, working with symmetry,…
In the Fountain Riki uses both Mudbox and Zbrush: he actually does the same thing twice to show both workflows. I think he uses Polycruncher (ext. app) instead of Decimation Master to get his meshes from Mudbox into Max, other than that it's very similar.
If you want something that throughly goes over everything beginner, from the interface to using brushes and everything in between, I personally recommend the zbrush 3.5 and 4 dvds from eat3d. Your team can reference exactly what the need within those dvds when ever they need to. The biggest differences from the 3.5 dvd to…
http://eat3d.com/free/zbrush_stone Mudbox is great in that you can open it up for the first time and be sculpting in 30 seconds without someone telling you how to navigate the ui. That being said, once I learned the basics of Zbrush (through the 3.5/4 eat3d dvds), I found my self using that more often than not.
I just took a look at the hard surface stuff, it focuses on character related work, our character guy already knows how to use zbrush. I'm looking for something more worlds related as a project they can do once they get through the 3.5/4 intro training. The onlything I saw on there was the fountain, I don't really want to…
If they haven't used zbrush before, probably one of the best things you could have them do is just spend 20 minutes or so reading the Getting Started PDF, and another couple of minutes making sure they soaked it all in. They'll be needlessly confused if they think they're jumping into a 3d scene, orbiting a camera around a…