I am an industrial designer working with diffrent kind of products. A lot of plastic shapes. I am looking for a 3D sketching tool. Would ZBrush fit my needs??? Can anyone direct me to any productdesigner who uses ZBrush? Car designer? Furniture? I use Rhino 3D as a design tool. But I would like to work faster in my sketching fase. Not doing it in 2D like painter or alias sketch.I use a wacomboard in my sketch fase.
quensel,
Nice to see another industrial designer in here. You can use Zbrush for a lot of soft good product designs. Also working on surface alopes etc. You will not be able to get exact meaurements though. Like you said though it is an excellent 3D sketch tool.
Rhino is a good cheap tool but has its limitations. I personally like to use Maya becasue of the history between the nurbs surface and the curvs you create. This gives you a quick and easy way to edit and move around your shapes. That combined with the polygon and sub-d modeling techniques you can get some pretty powerful concepts out.
All in all, Zbrush is a very good program to figure out textures and cool looking shapes for your ID models. Combining it with Maya, Rhino and Solidworks will give you tons of ability other ID people do not.
Good luck 
I did a very old attemp of car modeling in zbrush, not very well done but just to give you an idea:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/attachment.php?attachmentid=18294
some characters accessories, like those shoes for rainbow six:
More recently I did the Z-snipe:
I unfortunatly had no chance to see this printed in 3d…
I would say that once you got the precise workflow, Zbrush 3.1 is an extraordinary powerfull tool for design. Mixing successfully organic and mechanical work.
Indeed, it’s not as precise as a CAO programm, and it wasn’t design to. Maybe you could import your Rhino base mesh and work them in zbrush…
If ultra precision is not required (in the case of sketching) I think zbrush is great tool…
as always, those rainbow 6 models are unbelievable!
so it’s definitely doable.
you should also check this out:
the guy mentions “sketching” and “quick” and he comes from rhino development so this might be something for you… it’s also designed to be used almost exclusively with a tablet.
free beta period right now too…
jin