Thanks Eric! just saw 1.9 announcement on facebook. sounds frikkin' awesome! (next time I`ll wait a day longer before ranting. :) sorry for giving you a hard time :) )
Someone posted this the other day. Maybe it will help a little bit. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2031520&postcount=1155 http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2031894&postcount=1179
Here's my review of the 13HD: http://blog.environmentartist.com/?p=1079 I really like it. But again I use a laptop and work pretty mobile. ZBrush, Phoshop, etc works fine though.
Oh, sorry I forgot to tell you that you don't need the full version. There's a Keyshot For Zbrush and a bridge which is only $149 https://www.keyshot.com/zbrush/ You could use alpha to create surface details yes. Grassetti is well-known for doing it manually tho :D
Near the end of the SF data in the shader, it says: proporder:2-1037-1306-533-447-69-9-177-571-626-145-476 Remove -476 from that list, and it should work again. This is due to a bug that was in 0.29, in which you saved the shader, most likely
by my calculations you could get the EXACT same shape out of 172 tris, thats without going into all the other things suggested by others edit- thought that might not be that usefull so i whipped this up in a minute or two (148 tris damn my calculations are crap)
the student versions from Autodesk and quixel are non commercial only. The Marmoset team as it seems wants you to actually being able to earn money with their product. the pricetag of $129 is for a student in my opinion ok.
Automation of all things that you would have to spend a lot of time doing otherwise, like for example cables => https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=35639
I also thought the lax security was a little odd, but then I figured that the group was well within the sights of any security hidden from sight. I still have to read 119 through 123.