happy holidays to you too, zaxxon and everybody else. I wish the holiday spirit would have left a little bit of something lingering in my pocket
... I have no doubts about Mudbox's abilities. I'm a fan of traditional UI's so i think it would be really natural for me to grab it and go. But no app feels just right to everybody, so galleries alone are not enough reason to buy an app. Otherwise we'd all be using ZBrush and Blender...
sketchy, there are a few unique features of Mudbox (over ZBrush) that you may be overlooking:
**n-gon support (up to 16-sides allowed)
**true perspective camera
**true 3D environment (with real objects in 3D space)
**3D layers (unique until ZB2.5, if it's ever released)
**symmetrical sculpting across asymmetrical models
**traditionally designed UI
I am sure the unique feature list goes on far beyond this. But to me these represent the most important adantages, and they are the main reasons why i've demo'd ZBrush 4 times and still not purchased it. Of course, there are some major advantages of ZB over MB, especially when it comes to creating textures, alphas, and illustrations in general. But for sculpting, Mudbox was created for real 3D. ZBrush was not. And it's limitations are now becoming obvious.