Zbrush 3.5 Release 2 is out!

Zbrush 3.5 Release 2 is finally out and Pixo­logic has added lots of new func­tion­al­i­ties and fixes to this version.

• ZSpheres 2 and ZSketch

• Sur­face noise
• Brush noise
• Improved Lazy­Mouse with Back­track and Snap to Track modes

• New brushes such as Trim, Pla­nar, Noise, Move, Spher­i­cal, Slide, Form, Flakes, Crum­ple and more
• New Brush Depth Mask­ing to give com­plete brush con­trol on a surface
• New Mat­Cap mate­ri­als for ZSpheres 2/ZSketch mode
• Gra­di­ent PolyPaint
• Each Subtool can now have it’s own Tex­ture, Dis­place­ment, and Nor­mal Map
• Enhanced dis­place­ment and nor­mal map options such as native export of 32-bit dis­place­ment maps, High-Definition Dis­place­ment, Nor­mal, and Tex­ture maps from HD geometry
• Improved per­spec­tive with a floor grid
• Reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the Tool sub-palettes to coor­di­nate with selected SubTools
• Abil­ity to merge all vis­i­ble SubTools and option­ally weld the seams
• New PUVTiles map­ping method, which rep­re­sents the most effi­cient use of UV space yet
• Poly­Paint­ing accu­racy has increased from 8 to 16 bit
• Mesh mask­ing has increased from 8 to 16 bit
• New Gra­di­ent poly­paint­ing option to give a dynamic tran­si­tion between colors
• New nav­i­ga­tion to work with the vir­tu­ally unlim­ited zooming
• Right-Click Nav­i­ga­tion
• New slid­ers added to Project All, pro­vid­ing more con­trol over your results
• Mem­ory man­age­ment enhance­ments give the capa­bil­ity to sub­di­vide your mod­els to higher poly­gon counts
• New ambi­ent occlu­sion mask­ing, which can cre­ate an AO tex­ture for use in other applications
• Improved export/import options with the capa­bil­ity to import and export Maya .ma file for­mat with auto­matic setup of shad­ing net­work for Tex­ture, Dis­place­ment and Nor­mal map­ping (This fea­ture is a part of the GoZ sys­tem. The full GoZ imple­men­ta­tion will be included in the next update )
• Fast local access to ZBrush files with the new Light­Box browser (the full ver­sion of Light­Box will be included in ZBrush 4)

…and many more enhance­ments and opti­miza­tions through­out ZBrush.

Aladdin flying on the ghoul’s back

Aladdin and the Princess rid­ing on the Ghoul’s back

The Aladdin and the Ghoul 3d mod­els are ready and just need to be posed for this image. Since it would take too long to rig and enve­lope these char­ac­ters we have decided to use ZBrush to set their poses and then import them into Vue 7 XStream. We’ll give you more updates on our process and the results in the future. Thanks for stay­ing with us.

Samand automobile render

Theme Ride Concepts

In our lat­est project we were asked by Avi­jeh Mehr Archi­tec­tural Con­sul­tants to cre­ate con­cepts for an amuse­ment park they are con­struct­ing. We were charged with two of the theme rides, Alice in Won­der­land and Aladdin and the Magic Lantern.

Game characters concept design

We cre­ated con­cept designs for a few game char­ac­ters a while ago and we never got around to build­ing their 3D mod­els. These were really great char­ac­ters designed by Faraz Shan­yar who had also designed some of our con­cepts for our theme park projects. We finally were able to pick up these con­cepts and cre­ate them in 3D and in the next few posts will present you with some work in progress images as well as the final cg characters.

These are 4 char­ac­ters which are inspired by Iran­ian folk­lore and mythol­ogy. They are a group of war­riors who have been com­rades for a very long time, fight­ing side by side and have been deformed by fatigue, the hor­rors and atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in war and their bat­tle wounds. Nev­er­the­less they stick together through thick and thin since they have learned how to fight and win together.

Armin

Kam

Ghob

These char­ac­ters were cre­ated for our com­pany demo and will not be fea­tured in any future game for the moment. Hope you enjoy them and we will pub­lish new blog posts in the future on their making.

Blog posts repetition

I just wanted to apol­o­gize to those read­ers who have sub­scribed through our Face­book page or by other means such as RSS for our old posts being re-submitted as new posts.

This is due to the fact that our blog has been hacked twice by some sick peo­ple over the last two months and every time we re-upload the site all our old posts get sub­mit­ted as new posts. I apol­o­gize before­hand if this is caus­ing any inconvenience.

For those of you who may have the same prob­lem I’m post­ing some links that will help you secure your site. While we all know that noth­ing is uncrack­able, these tips will at least make your blog much harder to crack.