Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 24, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Added are FiberMesh for creating 3D fibers, new brushes for brush and long-hair structures, and a render mode to Render these hairs individually, as well as new filters for final rendering.
The biggest news in the update – free for license holders – is FiberMesh, for which manufacturer Pixologic promises creation, manipulation and sculpting with a direct view of the changes. FiberMesh creates realistic 3D fibers, hair and fur, which can be exported directly. On Top of that there are dedicated FiberMesh brushes (Groom) with their own adjustable parameters. And as a continuation of this, “Micromesh” is part of the sculpting module, which renders fibers or individual polygons separately.
Also new are BPR Global Shadow and Ambient Occlusion settings, which are intended to help with casting shadows. Fine details are added in the b release by means of alpha masking, which is positioned using transPose. Smooth surfaces and Their curvatures are intended to be determinable using the “Surface Smothness Feature” on the basis of the polygon mesh curvatures, which in turn creates masks from them.
Also new when editing masks are the “Shrink and Extend” scaling functions as well as tools for editing the topology, such as Group Mask and Edgeloup for the mask edges. Anyone who has already installed ZBrush 4R2 can now download the updater from the Pixologic Download Center.
Plug-in
Anyone who installs the new version also has two new palettes in front of them, which require additional plug-ins. These are, on the one hand, the already presented NoiseMaker and, on the other, QRemesher, presented as an alpha version in February. QRemesher is a joint development by Pixologic and Verold and, as the name suggests, is intended to make both automatic and controlled remeshing easier. To what extent this works, however, we were not yet able to test at the present time.
You can find further information here.
