Hi Zymon,

I spoke to you over in ZBrushCentral (I'm chrisd over there).

I think the difficulty that you might find in addition to learning the different applications is that some of the things you wish to do are not easily combined into a single process or application.

ZBrush has no absolute units system, so its really not possible to make things fit into a real environment, or build something using actual measurements. However, it excels at real 3d texturing which is what you described as an important feature. There are other apps that can do this too, although ZBrush one of the best. Blender is also fairly good at this, and given that its open source, its the best deal around.

Using Moi or another CAD type application to do the precise building as a nurbs model means exporting to a mesh (triangulated) format to create the 3d texturing that will 3d print. There is no good way to combine nurbs modeling and 3d texturing in a single application. Nurbs does not represent high frequency detail well (such as what occurs in nature) and typically results in a "melted" effect or softening of the detail. There are applications that can use displacement with nurbs, or convert a mesh to a nurbs object. However, If the desire is to create a crisp or realistic 3d texture, then nurbs will be unsuitable.