Novermber 14, 2008 Joe Alter, Inc has just released LipService w/LBrush for 3DSMax.
It is a sort of swiss-army tool crammed into a single 3DSMax Modifier.
The tool was designed to be a WYSIWYG facial animation solution that
let's you animate, puppeteer, and sculpt with your targets. The
sculpting tools are so advanced, however, that you might wind up just
using it to do sculpts that you might have otherwise exported to Mudbox
or ZBrush. The tool features a multi-res subdiv mesh that can be edited
and animated at any level of detail. So your little wrinkles and
furrows can come and go as an integrated part of your sculpted target,
but you needn't be encumbered by all that detail while sculpting the
gross animation.
Like
Mudbox and ZBrush, you can go back and fourth between resolutions,
paint stencils, texture, sculpt and blend at any level right inside
your max workspace. You can paint features from one target to another,
and even paint high resolution texture and displacement detail right in
the Max view port.
Performance
is similar to Mudbox 1.0, it can get a little chunky around 1M polygons
if you don't hide the areas you're not working on, but it's still far
superior to anything you'll find inside 3DSMax. Faster card = faster
display.
Animation is straight forward, and looks fantastic.
The shape interpolation is a splined interpolation, not a morph. Your
animation flows through the targets without stopping on them. It gives
the animation a really "fleshy" look that you just can't duplicate with
a morph tool. You can also layer the animation in tracks, and perform
things like blinks and eyebrows with the mouse in real-time to liven it
up.
The
texture painting lets you paint seamlessly with color swatches, copy
brushes, displacements and stencils. You can bake textures out to
images, displacements, and normal maps with a variety of options
(included animation).
Joe Alter, Inc is known for their popular hair and fur tool, "Shave and a Haircut". The product is currently available for $99 for 3DSMax 8,9,2008,2009. Alter says the Maya version should ship by Feb.
There
is a fully enabled 45 day demo version of the product on the website,
excellent support, documentation, and some flash videos. Definitely
worth adding this powerful tool to your arsenal, at least give it a
play but at 99 bucks, how could you resist? Really.. how cheap ARE
you?
for more information see www.lbrush.com
* Mudbox is a registered trademark of Autodesk, Inc
* Zbrush is a registered trademark of Pixologic, Inc
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