Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 Posted by Jim Thacker

Pixologic announces features of ZBrush 4R2


A ZBrush model matched into an HDR backplate using ZBrush 4R2’s new LightCap functionality.

The next update to ZBrush will overhaul the BPR renderer and add new features for automatically matching ZBrush models to HDR backplates, Pixologic has revealed.

In a thread on ZBrushCentral, company founder Ofer ‘Pixolator’ Alon announced that ZBrush 4R2 will update the Best Preview Renderer to a full 32-bit floating-point HDR pipeline.

The upgrade, which will again be free to registered users, also offers a ‘LightCap designer’.

According to Alon: “LightCap (Light-Capture) is similar to MatCap (Material-Capture) but is applied directly to the environment, not to a particular material.”

The new feature will make it possible to view HDR lighting on a model while sculpting in the viewport, and to match a ZBrush mesh automatically to an HDR backplate.

Judging by the demo images, the results would need a bit of work before they approached the quality of an HDR render created in an all-round 3D package, but for a quick preview tool, they don’t look at all bad.

No details of the release date have been announced, although with Alon commenting that R2 is not yet in beta, we’d imagine it will still be several months away.

Read the full thread on ZBrushCentral