Pixologic has released some video material for the upcoming version of zBrush. Very impressive stuff!
I’ve been waiting forever for this! I wish it was more than anyone’s guess when it will be released.
Those features all look amazing. I’m grateful for the retopology tools, the subtools feature is very welcome, and the rigging looks amazing (and easy!). I wonder if there’s any chance those zsphere rigs can come out as something recognizable in another program, like an animator.
That would be great, yes. But i think this zSphere created Topology is very complicated to export or to understand for other 3D Apps. Maybe they can convert them to bones with surface weighting or somewhat like that…
Definitly, these new features will make it much easier to create clean looped meshes to be put into our games…
Cant wait, till its released 
I wonder if ZB will support any new export formats with the new release. If it stays with plain old OBJ I’m afraid any chance of zsphere rigs → bones is gone. Even without that feature, though, this update will crush most, if not all, of my reasons not to model organic shapes exclusively with ZB.
any chance of zsphere rigs → bones is gone
i’m pretty sure they don’t intend this. as i understand it the zsphere rigs are for in zb only. that might change though. would be cool. the rest of the features are out of hand - can’t wait!
You might like to check out the upcoming Silo release too. Much more focused tool (which has its pros and cons):
Looks really interesting. The interface looks very cleaned up. The interface always was a bad point on zBrush, though it improved much, with the release of 2.0.
I’ve only been with ZB since 2.0, but it’s way of working definitely appeals to me. In a way, the upcoming Mudbox’s promise to have a more standardized interface is somewhat of a disappointment to me. Form should follow function, they say.
Whew, you should visit the forum threads on Mudbox at cgtalk. The community is literally split- with some talented zBrush artists who can’t wait to switch to Mudbox, some others who love the interface and will never switch, and even more who tried zbrush and could never get past the interface.
Although mudbox looks impressive, the new features they showed about zBrush 2.5 like mesh extraction are amazing. The texturing is even done directly on polygons- NOT uv’s Weird stuff.
Pixologic also said they aren’t revealing everything zBrush 2.5 has in it. I got excited for Mudbox, but zBrush has a huge head start and a version out for Mac right now.
it will be interesting to see what the competition does for Pixlogic.