ZBrush 4 R2 – new features revealed

Andy Price | Events | News | Products | 11/08/2011 21:31pm

Pixologic’s sculpting app always draws the crowds at SIGGRAPH and this year’s show is no exception – read on to find out all about the new features

As well as some inspirational sculpting masterclasses, the team were on hand to demo the new features of ZBrush 4 R2.

Alongside the Best Preview Render, a new cut tool and LightCap materials, R2 boasts a new feature called Dynamesh, which solves one of the long-standing issues with ZBrush.

Whenever you’re freeform sculpting, it’s often hard to extend your mesh too much without using up the available topology – polys get stretched and it’s difficult to add additional detail. But with Dynamesh you simply make a gesture on the canvas and ZBrush retopologises the object, giving you a nice medium-density mesh that you can continue working on.

This function can also be used in conjunction with the new Booleans, or when using a subtool brush to join meshes together. Again, activate Dynamesh and your objects are glued together into a single mesh and any distorted or stretched polys are removed.

You don’t get a completely perfect mesh – ZBrush adds the occasional tri to maintain density and poly flow – but will be completely fine for most artists, and is great for doodling and adding large appendages such as limbs, with the same sort of freedom you get from voxel sculpting.

Other new functions include a ‘repeat stroke’ action which does exactly as you’d expect, enabling you to use a subtle stroke again and again to build up detail, or for example, using the transform tool on other meshes in your scene.

R2 looks to be a significant update and, as usual, will be available free to registered users on September 20th.

Watch some sneak peek videos of the new ZBRush 4 R2 features

Posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2011 at 9:31 pm under Events, News, Products. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.