A rant on Mudbox (or my ineptitude, you decide)
polycounter lvl 3
Hi all,
Recently I have decided to finally stop being scared and start sculpting until I produce something worthwhile (that's after about 3 months of nothing but polygon modelling). The packages I have at my disposal are Mudbox and Blender (I won't be able to get ZBrush for quite a while unless they offer a substantial student discount). And I've run up against quite a predicament- I can't, for the love of me, produce anything in Mudbox. Or at least not even close to anything I can make in Blender. Here's a sculpt that took me a few hours that I made using dynotopology in Blender:
https://sketchfab.com/models/337cf065fabc4ff087e765f431110041
Keep in mind that I'm running against a performance wall in Blender (can't go much beyond a million tris). Thus I made use of Mudbox in my workflow for one thing (as far as modelling is concerned)- retopology. Sure it's got nothing on Zbrush's retopo tools but it sure as hell beats manual retopology (especially if I'm just trying to render a still). And that's it, if I try to model the same way I do in Blender I simply am not getting the results I desire.
Which makes me wonder- are there some setup steps I completely overlooked? With Blender you install it and you're good to go, all the brushes are calibrated optimally and you'll get the bulk of the functionality straight out of the box. But for Mudbox half the brushes seem to be broken (it looks like I'm poking the mesh with my brush not unlike lazily poking a jello block with a spoon). And the more I subdivide my mesh the less effect the brushes have so that even cranking up their intensity to maximum does not help (and the brush ends up having miniscule effects).
My point here isn't to hate on Mudbox (really, for texturing work I find it to be a godsend where Blender's texture painting and setup kinda suck- quite the contrast to sculpting); but I've run up against so many walls when trying to sculpt anything in Mudbox I just couldn't help but rant a little. So I wonder how are you guys doing it, those that use Mudbox (I would imagine it to be a minority?). I find it so frustrating that I have this powerful package at my disposal yet cannot utilize even half of its potential (since I'm pretty much exclusively using it for texture painting). Feel free to correct me if I'm speaking out of my ass here, I'd really rather someone harshly correct me than be ignorant.
Recently I have decided to finally stop being scared and start sculpting until I produce something worthwhile (that's after about 3 months of nothing but polygon modelling). The packages I have at my disposal are Mudbox and Blender (I won't be able to get ZBrush for quite a while unless they offer a substantial student discount). And I've run up against quite a predicament- I can't, for the love of me, produce anything in Mudbox. Or at least not even close to anything I can make in Blender. Here's a sculpt that took me a few hours that I made using dynotopology in Blender:
https://sketchfab.com/models/337cf065fabc4ff087e765f431110041
Keep in mind that I'm running against a performance wall in Blender (can't go much beyond a million tris). Thus I made use of Mudbox in my workflow for one thing (as far as modelling is concerned)- retopology. Sure it's got nothing on Zbrush's retopo tools but it sure as hell beats manual retopology (especially if I'm just trying to render a still). And that's it, if I try to model the same way I do in Blender I simply am not getting the results I desire.
Which makes me wonder- are there some setup steps I completely overlooked? With Blender you install it and you're good to go, all the brushes are calibrated optimally and you'll get the bulk of the functionality straight out of the box. But for Mudbox half the brushes seem to be broken (it looks like I'm poking the mesh with my brush not unlike lazily poking a jello block with a spoon). And the more I subdivide my mesh the less effect the brushes have so that even cranking up their intensity to maximum does not help (and the brush ends up having miniscule effects).
My point here isn't to hate on Mudbox (really, for texturing work I find it to be a godsend where Blender's texture painting and setup kinda suck- quite the contrast to sculpting); but I've run up against so many walls when trying to sculpt anything in Mudbox I just couldn't help but rant a little. So I wonder how are you guys doing it, those that use Mudbox (I would imagine it to be a minority?). I find it so frustrating that I have this powerful package at my disposal yet cannot utilize even half of its potential (since I'm pretty much exclusively using it for texture painting). Feel free to correct me if I'm speaking out of my ass here, I'd really rather someone harshly correct me than be ignorant.
Replies
Mudbox is nice for sculpting. But there is a big lack of "ready to use tools". You can pretty much do everything on mudbox, but is a lot of manual work.
Trust me, I have watched all that I could find but it seems there just plain isn't as much content as there is for open source software. I really get the feel like I'd have to go and sign up for a training course in Autodesk products to really know how to use them.
@GlowingPotato Even the 2015 rendition of Maya doesn't have as good a retopology tool as I'd like (the manual kind). Blender right now has both cylindrical contour retopo and polystrips drawing recontour, as long as I'm not working with an absurdly dense model they will yield better results.
EDIT:
For reference:
Contours Retopo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RR06wjt2rs&list=UU9VayT7q3pQ7tdF-TG4Q0yQ
Polystrips Retopo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN1aC7DsS6A&list=UU9VayT7q3pQ7tdF-TG4Q0yQ
All that said, you should be able to hit well over 1 million polys in Blender. Last time I tried pushing Blender's boundaries, I was sculpting on a 100 million poly sphere for example. I tend to see a lot of users stick only using Dynotopo, which you shouldnt be doing. It bottle necks pretty fast, since the topology is pretty messy and there is no multimesh modifier taking place.
You can do some pretty decent sculpts with blender BUT only use dynotopo to pull out the form, then remesh it or manual retopo it and sculpt through the traditional multi-rez approach. Its the same thing I have to do with zbrush and modo when sculpting.
I highly recommend getting a solid retopology application, something like topogun/3d coat will save you a lot of time and effort.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/100980/
export the base human from mudbox to blender to check scale.
For mudbox character sculpting. I would suggest to give these videos a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpe94wsBklJLqI7yd6ROst0wBR-wDIrq8
:poly121:
/myrant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdmeMAM1YKM start there, it demonstrates a load of core techniques. from there, move on to the tutorials that everyone else kindly linked.
That said, I think you just need to learn a bit more about the brush system and how the brushes are controlled. there is an advanced section for each brush that lets you link your pen pressure to size or strength of the brush. On almost all brushes I set my min size % to around 90 and the min strength % to 5. this works for me and the way I prefer to work. That may not work for you though.
this...