ZBrush Summit and ZBrush 4R7 preview with KeyShot bridge

Over the weekend Pixologic has broadcasted it's ZBrush Summit over the wire for all the community members who were not able to attend it live. It was a well organized and very interesting event with many guests from the industry and an infectious fascination. While 3D Printing was certainly a huge topic the preview of the upcoming ZBrush 4R7 relaese was the major highlight!

Pixologic did it again...
Like a couple of years ago when organic modeling doesn't felt natural in common 3D software packages ZBrush revolutionized the way the artists handle 3D. It just feels natural to paint in 3D with ZBrush and this made it a perfect tool also for most artists in the industry.
When you look at Zbrush Central it reflects all the amazing work which relates most of the time to characters and organic modeling. Some of the folks were trying to push the boundaries of ZBrush came up with great hard surface models, but it was not easy.

Pixologic learned from that and provided hard surface modeling tools which helped a lot.
But with the release of 4R7 Pixologic invested, heart and perfect UX skills and came up with an integrated solution for hard surface and low poly modeling. From the look and the workflow in the previewed demo suddenly poly modeling feels natural, too.

See here the details and the live demo!

So an exciting release! Thise will help artisits to stay focused in one application without the back and forth of to many apps. With this release Pixologic also included the support for 64bit (which was awaited long time). And the anounced bridge to KeyShot including a version of the renderer. This alows the user to render out the ZBrush artworks with a click on a button. The bridge contains also live updates which reflects changes of the ZTool directly to KeyShot and the Transfer of materials and textures.

To sum it up: Can't wait got get my hands on the new release especially with the KeyShot renderer...

Well played Pixologic! You did it again!

Verve - Fluid Dynamics Painter

Whow! It has been now over one year since I wrote my last blog post! This sounds like a perfect chance to introduce a very entertaining piece of software called Verve by Taron!

Verve is a Fluid Dynamics Painter! So what does this mean. It is basically a special kind of painting Application which has an special mode which let's the software calculate fluids behavior. This is very inspiring and entertaining at the same time. 

What is it good for? Find out by yourself but be warnend - it is pretty addictive =)

But beside the fun of fiddling around with the dynamics this behavior builds the foundation for endless possibilities to simulate real paint and all sorts of brushes!

So check it out!

You can find the download of Verve here:

http://taron.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4

The documentation is here:

http://taron.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6

A decent set of introduction and explanatory videos are available on YouTube!

https://www.youtube.com/user/333taron/videos

And there is an active forum here with galleries, challenges, etc here:

http://taron.de/forum/index.php

Here are my first experiments:

MyPaint - Sketchbook painting tool

I am still on the research to improve my painting and sketching skills. Beside wondering through the web for inspiration and tutorials. I am also in the middle of finding the approperiate tool to sketch/paint. I know it comes all down to actual paint but I want at least a tool which supports me, is easy to use, not overloaded with features and has a great response to the pen. Right now I am using my wacom intuos 3.

Searching for the tool found 3 tools most artists speak about

• Sketchbookpro
• Artrage
• Corel Painter

But it seems that there is a new star which seams pretty impressive to me. I found an open source tool which is called MyPaint. At the time writing this post the current stable version is 0.71. But everybody is waiting for the version 0.8 which should be out already...

Detailed information and downloads can be found here:
http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

David Revoy (http://www.davidrevoy.com/) a great artist. He seems to be involved as a conept artist in the blender open movie project "Durian" http://durian.blender.org/ . 

He developed a bunch of very useful brushes and shares his color pallettes, too.
http://www.davidrevoy.com/?article27/free-palettes-to-download-for-gimp-mypaint-and-photoshop

he also shares an amazing video walkthrough tutorial here:
http://www.davidrevoy.com/?article24/video-time-lapse-lezard

So since it is all about painting if I want to improve my skills ...
back to the board =)...

D.

(If I find time I will test the tools from the bullet points above... but for now I will stick with MyPaint)...

Please feel free to comment what tools you use and your thoughts...