Modo 401 was released yesterday.  USD $395 to update and USD $995 for new seats.  While its new animation and enhanced rendering is here, as a modeller, very little has changed.   There have been very minor updates to the sculpting system (still a pale refelection of something like Zbrush or Mudbox), the painting is at least multithreaded, but a pale refelection of something like Bodypaint or ZB, and the UV system has been sped-up some, but still isn’t as complete and or advanced as a stand-alone UV tool like UVLayout Pro.  Indeed, they are slowly marching towards a “complete package” (similar to Newtek’s Lightwave) but so far hasn’t impressed me that they can ever truly aim at something like Maya, Max, or Softimage without a significant enhancement to their animaiton sub-system.  Right now, it seems OK for motion graphics, but it is a devil to really animate.  Luxology is showing things akin to character animation on their web site, but be very cautious before parting with your money.  While it may be true that some of these projects were modeled and rendered in Modo401, the actual animating appears to have taken place in external programs (like Messiah or Motion-builder) and the animation has been re-imported into Modo.   In other words, you need to do your animaiton elsewhere before rendering in Modo.

Details of the upgrade can be found here: http://www.luxology.com/modo/product_information/documents/modo401_Improvements.pdf.   The modelling, sculpting, painting, and UV sections I think speak for themselves.

Well, on the heels if Mudbox 2009 arriving to the Mac, Pixologic has offered their response.  ZB Mac 3.12B will ship on Monday, April 27th.   While the exact content was not disclosed, the statement posted on ZB’s forums was “ZBrush 3.12B contains optimizations and feature adjustments to ZBrush 3.12″.   We can hope it will fix some of the more significant problems in ZB 3.12.

Also, this week Pixologic announced ZBrush4.    The statement is:

ZBrush 4 to be released in August, 2009

Since its inception, Pixologic revolutionized the world of digital art. When ZBrush was unleashed, it became the tool of choice for artists by allowing them to bridge their richest imaginations with reality.

With each new release of ZBrush, came a fundamental change to the way artists created some of the world’s most groundbreaking artwork. Through out these past years, innovative new tools coupled with unparalleled leaps in performance, enabled artists to maximize their creativity.

THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES with ZBrush 4

As with previous versions of ZBrush, Pixologic is dedicated to develop tools that not only break the mold, but also reinvent it. ZBrush 4 offers significant enhancements to existing features, and a host of new innovative tools that will allow you to explore and ignite your imagination.

THE FUTURE BEGINS August 2009

ZBrush 4 will be a free upgrade for all registered users of ZBrush on Windows and Mac systems.

It looks like things are heating up in the sculpitng applicaiton market and ZBrush intends to keep in the game.

With unusually little fanfare, Autodesk Mudbox 2009 is now shipping for the Mac.    It looks like there will be 30-day demo version available next week.  Read about here: http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/25575/.   Not suprisingly, Pixologic (makers of Zbrush) erradicated the thread on their forums written by concerned Mac users about the lack of displacement map generation.   ZB 3.5 is still lost in space, so mac users might want to join the Mudbox party at DashDotSlash.Net, where you can find lots of tutorial material from Wayne Robson (former ZB guru) on the new sculpting entry on the Mac, Mudbox: http://www.dashdotslash.net/.

Getting low latency in Vista64 is often important for real-time audio work.   Unfortunately, converting a couple of Mac Pros presented a variety of challenges, several induced by Apple’s somewhat half-hearted approach to Bootcamp.  (Who can blame them?   They want to push OSX and making their hardware super-friendly to OSX isn’t exactly on their agenda . . .)

My motivation for Vista64 was pretty straight forward–first, I needed to run apps that simply aren’t available on the Mac and no good equivalents existed.   Second, most application are better tested on Windows than Mac due large user bases.  Third, I find that Apple’s pricing strategy isn’t going to work for me in the long run, especially on notebook systems.  (I use relatively high powered notebooks.)   But I digress . . .  getting to low latency Vista 64.

First, getting Vista64 on older Macpros is itself a challenge.   Why?   Because Apple’s EFI firmware on systems minted before mid-2008 is not EFI 2.0 compliant, but an older version.  Apple doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to bring these systems into compliance like other vendors nor does it seem fully compliant with older BIOS-base techniques.   Being niether here nor there creates a problem for Vista 64 SP1 as distributed.  It expects either a pure BIOS solution or EFI 2.0 solution and Apple really offers neither.  Put the Vist64 SP1 disk in and you’re going to see a boot error.   How to get around this?

It turns out it’s a pretty straight forward operation,  you will need to copy the Vista64 SP1 DVD to a new DVD and remove all the “;1″ stuff at the end of file names.   That’s it.  With those “;1″ markers (e.g. versioning) off the disk (from the current ISO 9660) standard.  You’ll be abe to boot and install Vista.  If you have a system running parallels or bootcamp, or another Windows system handy, a nicely detailed blog entry here (http://jowie.com/blog/post/2008/02/24/Select-CD-ROM-Boot-Type-prompt-while-trying-to-boot-from-Vista-x64-DVD-burnt-from-iso-file.aspx) can walk you through doing it with the free imgBurn utility.  OK so much for the “U” in UEFI . . .

Once you have Vista you’ll need drivers.   Apple has published 64-bit drivers with Bootcamp 2.1 so you’d think that’d be a skate.  You’d be wrong.   While Apple published drivers, they only published them as an “update” and you guessed it, Apple’s installers won’t let you install 64-bit drivers on hardware minted before mid 2008.   Not willing to buy more Apple hardware to run 64-bit Vista on my allegedly 2006 and 2007 64-bit hardware (Xeon and Core2 for those who are interested), nor was I willing to wait for the class-action “you said it was 64-bit but you did nothing to let us use it” case to kick in, a bit more investigation was order.

The net-net is that the drivers are available, but you’ll have to have a “new” version of the Leopard install disk (not the original distribution, but the Leopard disks that came with the post-mid-2008 systems.)  They have a the current drivers and you can grab them from there and run them individually.   Alternately, there are torrents out there that have the drivers if you can’t lay your hands on them.  This will get you to Bootcamp 2.0 and then you can apply the Bootcamp 2.1 patch from apple, which is available here (http://support.apple.com/downloads/Boot_Camp_Update_2_1_for_Windows_Vista_64).  One might ask Apple why we have to go to Pirate bay to get the working drivers for the 64-bit hardware we paid a premium price for, but I digress . . .

At this point you should have a 64-bit Vista system up and running.  It may need some bedding in, so let Windows Update do its its job and get your OS up to code, get yourself a good antivirus program (I like Symantec Norton or McAffe), and you perhaps update your Video drivers (nVidia has updated Vista-64 drivers on their web site, for example.)

Now that your up and running on Vista64, the next step is to get latency under control . . . solutions coming up in Part II

I’m quoted in 3D World’s March 2009 issue in the Article, Zbrush for Mac Trips Up.   I won’t reprint the whole article here since the specter of copyright violation has been raised (oddly by Pixologic and not 3D World.)   Relying on the journalistic protections of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution and subsequent “Fair Use” rulings of the US Supreme court, I’ll entertain you here with a few tidbits from the article, which can be found on page 28 of the March issue.

The article begins with: “The relationship between Zbrush Developer Pixologic and some  Mac-owning members of its customer base have deteriorated after the company’s garbled response to an apparent major bug in the latest release of Zbrush for Mac OS X.

I’m quoted as saying (from one of my forum posts on the subject): “It’s important for Pixologic to understand that incompleteness, costly work-arounds, and unknown timelines for fixes simply to reach parity in key functionality [with the Windows release] is not what we expect as customers.”

Jamie Labelle (Pixologic’s General manager) is quoted in the same article as saying: “There was a problem on our side with lack of communication . . . but for some it does work and for others, it is an issue.”

Labelle did not rule out a patch.   He is quoted in the article as saying “It depends on how [the tool] will be re-written.”