Two days ago Autodesk (finally) released a performance preview of Mudbox Dali, or officially named Mubox 2009. From the demo video we can see a lot of performance improvement especially from polycount wise by almost tenfold I think. Also the realtime lighting and shading could be a nice plus, although not that essential. We do not need to many polycount,around 10 million should be sufficient(for 1 objects), but we need a stable and robust displacement exporter, sadly this is not the case with ZB. If this is really a solid release, then We will switch from ZB to use it. This is a big possibility, because currently ZB, although massive in polycount wise, but is very buggy and lack a lot of core 3d feature such as an ability to group some objects easily or doing 3D texture painting directly on mesh without the need to project it into 2D. Polypainting is not a solution really because it is limited by polycount, thus is not able to produce high quality uv texture. And with its 2d core, its not that easy to integrate new 3d features, and also integrate with other software such as Maya or PRMan. But we'll see the next release of ZB before judging it to early.
Anyway, here is the performance preview of next release of Mudbox.
http://area.autodesk.com/mudbox_preview
