ZBrush is the hybrid tool for the hybrid artist. © 2004 Pixologic, Inc. All rights reserved, Pixologic and the Pixologic logo, ZBrush, and the ZBrush logo are registered trademarks of Pixologic Inc.

On the forums, at schools, in art departments, everyone’s talking about ZBrush 2.0. 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. Everyone’s doing it, wanna try?

Recently the Gnomon School of Visual Effects started the very first ZBrush class and has been overwhelmed by the response. 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.”

ZBrush, like many emerging artists today that use it, is a hybrid. It doesn’t fit into any one area of production. You could call it a modeling package. You could call it a 3D texturing package. You could call it a 2D paint package. And you would be right every time.

The first thing to understand about ZBrush is that it uses Pixols. 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. I can hear those words whiz right past people as they read them: RBG, XYZ, rotation, material and lighting information amongst other things. 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.

Another way to think about it is this. 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.

The second thing to understand is what they call “tools.” Coming from a 3D background we are used to calling our 3D objects, well, objects. In ZBrush an object is a tool. A tool can be either a 3D object or a brush used to modify a 3D object. Calling it a tool takes a little getting use to, but in ZBrush, 3D objects are tools we use to create Pixols. 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. And it is a stubborn heart.

ZBrush is a 2.5D program that has taken what it needs from 3D programs. It seeks to collapse the rift between idea and technique. 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 has a lightning fast renderer and outputs to Photoshop files, bitmaps or tiffs. It seeks to be a program where people express what is in their minds, not in their instruction manuals, where artists create gory orcs or whatever else they want and don’t worry about edge loops or other such more technical considerations.

To this end, ZBrush 2.0 automates many of the tasks that CG artists are use to doing for themselves and, quite frankly, that takes some getting use to. We are not used to being catered to. You need something done in Maya? Well, write a script! I even feel like I am cheating when I just press a button to, say, store a morph target. I keep looking around for the option box.

To be more specific, modeling in Maya forces the modeler to think of the flow of a model’s surface as he is thinking of the forms themselves, which can be distracting and time consuming. The equivalent feat for a sculptor would be to make her think of both the final mold and the sculpture at the same time. That is no way to create art.

Sculptors break these two very different tasks into two very different jobs and that is not a bad thing. Particularly when you can get an apprentice to do the grunt work! That is not to say that I cannot control edge loops in ZBrush 2.0 if I want to. ZBrush 2.0 gives me plenty of options for that, but having ZBrush deal with the topology of a model gets me closer to a realtime sense of interaction than any 3D package out there today can. Sculpting almost feels “real.”

That is the power of ZBrush 2.0. It gets the artist closer to the act of creation: an act that we have separated ourselves from by wires and microchips and insane math and complicated procedures and segregated departments.