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Autodesk Mudbox is one of the most widely used applications for high-resolution 3D sculpting and design, and its success is due in part to the feature sets Autodesk adds with each new release, such as the painting system in Mudbox 2009 and the Pose tools in Mudbox 2011. Autodesks Mudbox 2013 release, by comparison, feels a little bit more incremental; it adds much-needed customizability and usability updates to its interface, improves the way Mudbox works with the rest of the Autodesk suite and Photoshop, and introduces an array of new tools to improve the sculpting and painting workflows, but it has little in the way of flagship features that immediately sold us on an update.
ViewCube and the roll-your-own interface
Mudboxs straightforward user-friendly interface was initially a key to its success, but as the product evolved into a robust application, the interface simply hasnt kept up. Aside from minor tweaks here and there (Mudbox 2012 introduced Maya-like marking menus, for example), the interface remained largely the sameuntil now.
For starters, you can now customize Mudboxs interface. You can resize, drag, hide, and redock the Layers, Object List, and Viewport Filters palettes; you can move and redock all the tool trays, and once youve made the changes you want, you can save the layout preset so its easy to restore specific layouts for specific tasks (and even share layouts with other users). Its a handy feature that really makes it easier to expose Mudboxs full set of tools and features.
Second, the popular ViewCube featured in other Autodesk applications (like Maya and 3ds Max) is now also available in Mudbox. The ViewCube makes it easier to navigate through 3D space, which is useful while sculpting and painting.
Third, Mudboxs dev team appears to have resolved a few basic usability issues that simply make the app easier to use. For instance, you can now select, transform, and delete multiple scene objects at once, and you can delete unused materials to free up memory. You can also delete polygons from the base level mesh, though there is still no way to cap holes in a mesh. With previous versions of Mudbox, it could be a bit difficult to select the right object or sub-object, but Mudbox 2013 has...