Quote - To those commenting about the various modeling applications, zbrush, blender, wings, modo, etc., in a thread about the anticipation of acquiring one of three-out-of-four big players in 3D, namely Max, XSI and Cinema.....

Don't those big boys have tremendously powerful modeling built in? And inline/integrated, to boot?

Comments please.

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P.S. To add to my quandary about this, my son who is in college for game design, a college that is 3DSMax-oriented, said to me "Dad, can we get ZBrush? Everyone at school is raving about it."

To answer some of the questions here, yes, the big boys have tremendously powerful modelling built in.  Lightwave and 3dsmax have long been known to have some of the best polygon and SubD modelling tools.  If you need evidence, just take a look over at CGArchitect and notice that most of the high end work there is 3dsmax.  Plus 80% or more of all today's high-end, low-poly game modelling, which isn't quite as low poly as it used to be, is done in Max (as your son is probably finding out now).  That said, Zbrush is a different world.  It has the ability to model using traditional SubD, but it's success and primary focus from the beginning was always on modelling using brushes and sculpting tools.  So artists who are used to that more natural modelling feel fell for it really quickly, because it handles a mesh as if it were virtual clay.  Zbrush is also used in professional pipelines for creating very highly detailed displacment maps to use in other traditional modelling applications, simply because it allows you to virtually and literally paint extremely fine surface deformations right into a high res mesh, and then use those details in their entirety on a much lower resolution base model, freeing up enormous resources, while still getting incredible results.

If your son is going to school to learn Max for things like game creation, that's probably why he wants Zbrush.  Zbrush is used this way to make normal maps, which in the gaming industry, are like the holy grail, making very low poly objects seem much more detailed than they really are.  Max can bake these normal maps and other information into a lowres model, which can then be exported for use in a game engine.