Autodesk Mudbox 2012 Released

As expected, Mudbox 2012 was released on April, 8th. It was a year since Mudbox 2011 release, and few months since Subscription Advantage Pack release, which featured some of this new features, but available only to Autodesk Subscribers. So I propose to take a look on what's new in this 3D sculpting and painting application, with some of them are really handy and promising.

What's New Features in Mudbox 2012

• UV-Less Painting: now it won't be necessary to prepare UV's for texturing in Mudbox. Even complex assets of multiple meshes can be textured this way, allowing to reduce or even eliminated time-consuming process of UV Unwrapping in some workflow models. Result textures can be exported as Ptex files for completely UV-less workflow or baked into UV space and exported as general image files.

• Large Texture Datasets: thanks to optimized texture and tile management system it's now possible to utilize thousand of textures in your work with ease and comfort, allowing to create more realistic and diverse assets.

• Paint Layer Masks and Blend Modes: this guys are from Photoshop-land and offers very similar functionality — Paint Layers now can have masks and choosable Blending mode, integrating Mudbox and Photoshop more precisely. Mudbox offers 22 blending modes — yey, that's one is delicious!

• Editable Stencils: they can be deformed in many ways for more accurate application to underlaying model.

• Single-Step Suites Interoperability with Maya, 3ds Max and Softimage: well, that's pretty self-explanatory — hit the button and your scene will be send to choosed app. Handy.

• Performance Improvements: and that one was expected aswell — how it's possible to have new version without performance improvements? In USSR there was a slogan — "Faster, Higher, Stronger!". That is it — Mudbox should run faster, take higher polycount and be stronger against lags . 

• New Brushes and Brush Options: one stroke to do them all! Autodesk promises to implement in next version long awaited button "Make it cool!". Oh no, Fool Day was more than a week ago, sorry for that. I mean — one stroke can be applied to several models at once. Enhanced Grab Tool and marque and lasso selections for Freeze, Select and Weight painting also included.

• Multiple Joints: this guys allows to pose any model in any pose .  Aah, that's dirty...  Anyway, this will help with those models that have hands, legs and even tentackles ( [tooltip title=]sweet Malboro![/tooltip] ). Symmetrical pairs of joints also supported.

• Pose Presets: joint transformations can be saved as Poses and later be used like Presets. Sculpting across poses are correctly translated among different poses, so this is non-destructively workflow. Can be used for sculpting and painting in hard to reach places... or for something else.

• Support for Linux 64-bit: wut?.. No... You can't be serious. Or I am. Well, happy day for those who prefers Linux.

Personally I find really enjoyable having 22 blending modes for layers and layer masks, I missing them. Potentially Ptex support can be useful also, but I didn't dived into it too much, so can't tell for myself, will it be used by me or not ( anyway — who cares? ). In other it's like planned revision of existing tools and features. Few new things, updated and enhanced old one — that's the recipe of new version. But I like it. Good reason to be inspired and create something outstanding, like beast with thousand tentackles and red-glowing eyes fluffy kitten.  To the point, Autodesk Maya 2012 also already released, so don't miss the overview of new features.

Hey, folks — do you like this release? I will be happy to hear it in comments, don't be shy, drop one.