Friday, December 30th, 2011 Posted by Jim Thacker

ZBrush 4R2b update to add new FiberMesh hair system


Pixologic’s FiberMesh preview video. (Uploaded to YouTube by another user.)

Pixologic has released a preview video of FiberMesh, a new hair system for ZBrush.

FiberMesh, which enables users to paint and style hair via ZBrush’s standard brush-based workflow, will form part of the upcoming free ZBrush 4R2b patch.

The result is a fully sculptable PolyMesh 3D object which can be exported to other apps, or previewed via ZBrush 4’s Best Preview Renderer.

Although we assume that you wouldn’t want to use the results much further down a pipeline – even if you didn’t need the hair to be dynamic, we imagine there might be issues making it play nicely with other renderers – FiberMesh has an obvious immediate appeal for concept work.

And not only for hair: in the video, Pixologic shows it creating fabric and trees.

ZBrush 4R2b was originally due to ship before the end of the year. The release date has now been put back to 23 January 2012.

Read the official announcement on ZBrushCentral