Mudbox or Zbrush for Environment Art?
polycounter lvl 6
I need to learn a sculpting package, is Zbrush the most prevalent tool used in the industry? I've played with both and I like Mudbox because it's very intuitive, Zbrush seems to be more powerful but the interface really throws me off.
Which one should I focus on for environment art?
Which one should I focus on for environment art?
Replies
2.5d is awesome for textures, dynamesh and insert brushes are awesome, fibermesh for trees or grass, decimation master for most of enviro retopo needs, Zspheres - very comfy for blockouts and once again - amazing for trees, UV master's there too. And on top of all that it just could handle 5 times more polys on my machine.
Need to work with actual textures and sculpt from a lot of base meshes without potentially screwing up the underlying geometry? Mudbox is probably the better fit. Mudbox is also good for doing realtime renders of high-poly geo by using their post processing stuff.
Zbrush though with Dynamesh... can't beat that workflow... Dynamesh is so fast for creating anything.
i would use both if i could.
Mudbox is a very straight forward, sculpting/painting package. It's incredibly easy to pick up, and works well with other Autodesk applications.
Pick your poison. Zbrush seems to be more powerful, but Mudbox is much easier to learn. If all you want is sculpting, they both do that just fine.
I'm curious about this. Is it a money concern? What's the factor that puts 3D Coat over ZBrush/Mudbox for you?
Mudbox is great for painting, but BodyPaint3D, 3DCoat, and Mari are all just as good if not better for most things. Even Blender is good other then its lack of layer support.
mudbox was designed as a production tool. its designed for sculpting, painting and map extraction. it was designed to be used along side maya or max and does not duplicate any of the features in those packages. it also has some integration features with those apps such as fbx support with joint support. psd with layers etc. it is designed to maximize hardware usage and push poly count, texture resolution and display speed.
zbrush was designed to be... zbrush. there is a rather sorted history which i will not go into but it was a rather mature application for 'making digital art' when bay raitt and others discovered that it could be used to sculpt models. from there its feature set has incorporated tools to make zbrush production friendly for sculpting, painting and map extraction. and continued to make interesting tools which may or may not be considered 'ready for production use', but interesting and fun to use such as dynamesh, a hair system, ray tracer etc.
there are some differences in what you can do in each app in the core areas of sculpting, painting, map extraction but generally you get the same work done in both apps. so you can choose which one you like. it is a matter of personal preference. the technical distinctions and feature differences only start to matter when you get into a very specialized task. in that case you can say that one is better then the other. if your starting out i would not worry to much about that and just pick the one you feel comfortable with.
But in 3DC, you can do entire environments with voxels.
Mudbox is indeed another options, but you will need to have the base already in package.
I wish I had spent my money on Zbrush. Not only because of the savings with free upgrades, but also because of the usefulness of the program.
Texture painting = Mudbox
Sculpting in Mudbox is horrible in my opinion but then using spotlight for texture projection painting is just as painful. Overall, you get more bang for your buck with Zbrush though.
If they could get Mudbox's texture painting into ZBrush, ZB would become a destroyer of worlds with it's awesomeness.
Everyone with experience will tell you zbrush is the standard for sculpting, there are no 'buts or maybes'. That's not to say we don't use both. A lot of people use both. Mudbox is great for texturing but zbrush just overwhelms it in terms of sculpting. Plus pixologic gives you constant updates for free, unlike most apps where it's a licence per version.
It's actually very common to see a env artist using zbrush. Hardsurface hi > lo is always going to be more common purely because most assets just arent a material type that require it. Cb is fine for assets with small screen time but say there's some big stone statue or modular architecture that has a fairly large screen time it will deserve zbrush love.
An env artist would be expected to be confident with hardsurface hipoly workflow & texturing, zbrush being a bonus, but the senior and more experienced env artists will all know and use zbrush frequently.
Of course a lot of things depend on the company and game style.
You can use Dynamesh to your advantage for texturing in ZB, I think with a mesh at 8 million vertices translates to 2K pixels of texture space?
Im curious, Ace-Angel can you please explain this workflow?