It has a lightning fast renderer and outputs to Photoshop files, bitmaps or tiffs. To that end it does not offer as many bells and whistles as a 3D program but it is not as complicated and obfuscating as one either. It seeks to collapse the rift between idea and technique.
ZBrush is a 2.5D program that has taken what it needs from 3D programs. While 3D objects are our common bond with other 3D packages and are all the rage for ZBrush right now, thanks in no small part to the work of artists such as David Cardwell and the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at its heart ZBrush is all about the Pixol. Calling it a tool takes a little getting use to, but in ZBrush, 3D objects are tools we use to create Pixols. A tool can be either a 3D object or a brush used to modify a 3D object. Coming from a 3D background we are used to calling our 3D objects, well, objects. The second thing to understand is what they call tools. Take Photoshop and add the hypershade, perspective camera, lights, mel and blend shapes from Maya, add a few naturalistic brushes from painter, add some very awesome procedural modeling and deformation tools and you have something close to ZBrush. That means that ZBrush has taken pixels as we think of them in Photoshop and added components that we traditionally link to 3D packages: materials, rotation and lighting.Īnother way to think about it is this.
I can hear those words whiz right past people as they read them: RBG, XYZ, rotation, material and lighting information amongst other things. A Pixol is similar to a pixel, except that while a pixel contains RGB information as well as XY coordinates, a Pixol contains RGB, XYZ, rotation, material and lighting information. The first thing to understand about ZBrush is that it uses Pixols.
You could call it a 3D texturing package. It doesnt fit into any one area of production. ZBrush, like many emerging artists today that use it, is a hybrid. Award-winning artist Meats Meier, who is teaching the class as well as working on five ZBrush DVDs for the Gnomon Workshop, says, We are overwhelmed by the interest in our ZBrush classes, many film and video game studios are now adopting the package and are scrambling to learn and integrate this new technology. Recently the Gnomon School of Visual Effects started the very first ZBrush class and has been overwhelmed by the response. Its enough to get the sense that we are in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Game and Data will show up just in time to rescue us all from our new addiction. On the forums, at schools, in art departments, everyones talking about ZBrush 2.0.
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