Oh boy seeing news of ZBrush 4R8, my excitement level is over 900%. Owners of ZBrush 4 got one more free update, 4R8.

Being so long time ZBrush user and having used it from the early 4 version, I feel like I’m on luxury yacht with Pixologic’s software with these free major updates. This is one investment that has truly paid off, to say the least.

Basically why ZBrush 4R8 is happening seems to be that Pixologic wants to give out the features in Core for us ZBrush owners before Core is released. This is very nice. According to Pixologic some of these new features include those that would have been (and will be) in ZBrush 5.

a prop being modelled using zBrush sculpting tools

This version of ZBrush will get the new transform gizmos and ability to create one’s own gizmos, also localisation to several languages.

Biggest thing for me personally are introduction of vector displacement maps (3D displacement maps). New version can c0nvert any mesh to these 3D maps and these can be used with brushes kind of like 3D alphas.

There’s also new real-time Boolean system which appears to be basically just a render effect, but one can convert or create mesh by using Make Union Mesh.

I am also very interested how well this will take advantage of larger memory via 64 bit support. We’ll have to see how this will be, it seems Core will be only 64 bit. I have been occasionally using 64 bit version of 4R7 for meshes that required a lot of memory, but the experience has not been always completely, ehm. stable. I wish that 4R8 would be more stable and truly 64 bit.

At this time Pixologic has not provided us a date when ZBrush 4R8 will be out, but I would guess before end of October.