Surface Pro 3 for ZBrush

From the title of this post you're probably thinking "What?  Did this fall through a time vortex?  I thought we were up to Surface Pro 4?".

Well yes, that is all true but as of this post I am still using a Surface Pro 3.  When I save enough funds I will most likely upgrade to a Surface Book.  When I do I'm sure I'd like nothing more than to write about using ZBrush on it.  However I decided after a very long hiatus to jump back into this blog.

But for now I'm on my lowly Surface Pro 3 i5.  I am however up to the glorious ZBrush 4r7 and Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.  Both work very well overall.  I do notice that from time to time I could probably use an i7 vs and i5 when I push polygons past 4million but other than that I am happy.

The Drivers
  One of the big differences of course from the Surface Pro mentioned in earlier posts is the N-Trig digitizer instead of the Wacom.  It was a bit of a pain finding and installing the drivers but once that is done it all seems to work well.

Download Surface Pro 3 Drivers HERE (as of 11/26/2016)

The Experience
While the screen on the Surface Pro 3 is quite a bit larger than on my old Surface Pro, it is still a bit smaller than a desktop unless you want to display in a barely readable DPI.  The end result is that when the LightBox UI starts, you have to hide the right panel in order to even see the "hide" button.  Similar issues exist with Photoshop though I would say that both Photoshop and ZBrush have done a great job allowing their UI to work at a wide variety of screen sizes.  Both are very workable on the SP3.

The pen surface is still a bit slippery especially when compared to the SP4 (which I've drooled over in the local Microsoft Store).  You get used to it but it can still be a challenge.  Probably more so when trying to draw lines in Photoshop than anything that I do in ZBrush.

Glitches
So far the only issue that I have is that when keeping ZBrush open for a long while between putting the tablet to sleep and waking it up is that the rendering becomes inverted.  What I mean by that is that if you're using a brush that is raising the surface of an object, it may look like it is subtracting from the surface.  I'm guessing that somehow the polygon normals get flipped when rendering.   The fix seems to be simply closing and restarting ZBrush

And in other news I also have an all electric 2016 Nissan Leaf.  The Surface Pro 3 is great for doing ZBrush while waiting for charging at one of the many free charging stations that I have available to me.

OK, so I realize this isn't ZBrush on the Surface Pro 3.  I'm actually using Unity 3D working on a game project.  All modeling was done in ZBrush though!