Finally. After more than a year and a half after the PC release, Pixologic finally announced the September 29th availability of ZBrush 3.1.2 for Mac OS X. I would find it very interesting to read a case study of the goings-on at Pixologic regarding the development.

It’s Mac Intel only which is inconsequential to me, but my condolences to the Power PC crowd out there who were hanging on.

I bought my ‘Upgrade’ in April (they’ve been taking pre-orders since the PC version was announced way back when) and have been anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. In the meantime, there have been a few very notable and somewhat entertaining threads over at the ZBrush Central forums regarding this debacle. As mentioned before – I would be really curious as to what the whole story is. Amongst the Mac ZBrush hold-outs it seems to be widely regarded as a PR train wreck. You can enjoy the more than 2300 posts (as of this writing) here.

Here’s my first zBrush thing. I did this in Boot Camp just after having bought the Mac version which came with a complimentary PC license because the Mac version didn’t work on the Mac naturally. Since a lot of the sculpting features depend on texture maps and all my software is Mac licensed (i.e. Photoshop), switching back and forth between PC and Mac OS X was too cumbersome to be practical – hence my excitement for the native Mac version to come out. Cheers and happy ZBrushing!

Hey all! It’s been a super busy couple of months. I’ve been a bit pre-occupied at work among other things.

Among those other things though have been helping Jenn with her shop and getting some of her ‘branding’ elements in place. New business cards are on their way along with some new website assets (when the cards get here). We’ll be getting some fabric labels for her handmade goods soon. Oh and we had rubber stamps made for addressing her shipments.
I’ve also been learning a bit of PHP (well, how to copy and paste it from tutorial sites and modify it) and so I have a new email system for the site. Click the contact me link in the right sidebar and drop me a line. I might even reply!
I did a bit of freelance work recently and grabbed myself a license of zBrush as a result. I plan to have fun with it at some point – although for those who aren’t up to speed on the whole zBrush thing – the user community has been waiting for an updated Mac version for quite some time now and it should be here at any moment. For now, I’ll install it on my Boot Camp partition, which just means I won’t use it much until the Mac version ships.
Speaking of shipping new software… Alias 2009 is right around the bend. Yup. Any day now.
As soon as we get our copies at work, I’ll put up a mini review. Maybe they’ll even have fixed the ‘tab key’ behavior that has become one of those little niggling under-my-skin things. It’s the first thing I check with every release of Alias, and then immediately file a bug report and then feature request. I’ve done so since version, um, 9? We’re coming-up on version 15 (a.k.a 2009) now; but whose counting?