I am wondering if you can extract images to a game and animate them. Most of the stuff I've seen in zbrush is sculpting... Haven't seen anything animated yet... Is it possible?

I've heard it's used to make good normalmaps for models made in other programs.

Does Zbrush even do animating?
I haven't looked at it in a very long time.

Zbrush is commonly used to add detail (geometry) to a basic model already created usually with other tool.

Due to the huge amount of geometry Zbrush creates these models are not useful for animation, however, you can get the normal maps and use them in low-poly versions of your models.

Yes Zbrush does have a huge amount of detail... It'd be amazing if every detail can be put into a game and still run smoothly. I am currently doing all my modeling on Maya. Maya has high poly count as it is.

Save this page to backup media and look at it again in 10 years

ZBrush is widely used for modeling, but in a combination with a bigger pipeline.
Basically, with ZBrush you can sculpt artisticly without worrying about the topology, then come back later and retopologize the model allowing clean deformations, export into say XSI or Maya and animate

I just keep wondering how many of your softwares are legal..

No really.. forget Zbrush, get blender3d... Now!..

Blender = Time consuming, and therefore very expensive tho

I use maya and zbrush from campus. That's as legal as it will get! Nobody uses it, nobody knows what they're doing...

Do you have a portfolio? or at least some screenshots of your work or models?

I dont see how Blender is more time consuming than the others. :S

But suit yourself.. I aint going back to the $oftware...

My reading on the topic is that by adopting its own UI and not following most of the conventions of the dominant Windows-derived UIs, Blender presents a significant training challenge. But I've only used it once, so what do I know?

Slightly related to the thread: I bought myself a copy of Carrara the other day because it gets excellent reviews, is Mac native (ish), was on special offer ($100 rather than $250) and the US's current extremely weak economy made that even cheaper for me as an international buyer. Plus it's supposed to be good for amateurs, like me. I'm still figuring it out though, so I don't have anything else like an interesting comment to make.

Yeah, I definitely agree with the UI bit. Even GIMP with its oft yelled at UI seems natural to use in Windows (the only thing it is missing, after all, is an MDI style container for all those windows).

I dislike Blender because of its tabs and its annoying mouse behaviour. I hate it that I cannot drag select well... everytime I hold my mouse button down I click on a vertex and it starts going places. If I want to move something I want to have to explicitly declare my intention for doing so.

Personally I use Lightwave 7 and 9. It has a perfectly sane interface, easy to use commands and it logically separates two inherently different tasks, modeling and scene layout, into two different programs.

EDIT: Ironically, the best modeler ever I've seen so far has been the one embedded into the level editor for a PC game called Serious Sam II. It does not speak well of professional and OSS modeling software when a tiny part of a $40 game beats them all in both UI and tool set.

I think blender works fine as far as mouse input goes , it just takes some getting used to.
- SiegeLord -
If you're having trouble selecting something , use the b key , once for a box select and press b again to use a circle select. The box select works with a click drag and the circle select lets you use the mouse wheel to adjust the size of the circle and then you left click to select whatever is inside the circle. There's also a lasso select somewhere too. For most operations if you press the right mouse button , it cancels whatever you were doing.

With blender I haven't gotten quite as far as making an animation or exporting model data , but I've made some decent beginner models and terrain and started messing around with saving image renders.

I will say that the tabs are somewhat foreign though. It helps if I dock less often used tabs together.

In case anyone doesn't know Blender has had sculpting support for quite some time

Also it is pretty much mandatory to have one hand on the keyboard mashing the buttons at all times. You can get by with only mouse too but it will be much more complicated and time consuming.