Hello.
I'm new to the whole 3D industry (Animation, Modeling, etc.) and I have a question regarding sculpting.
I have been given the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite 2016 Ultimate (from a family member), which is a suite that includes Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, Motionbuilder and Mudbox. I'm very, very happy that I got this and extremely excited to start learning! However, I'd like to know how Mudbox compares to Zbrush. I highly doubt that I'll get Zbrush as I already have Mudbox and I don't have enough money to buy Zbrush myself. I'm confident that Mudbox will provide more than enough for me as a beginner, but I'd still like to know what I'm "missing" out on by not using Zbrush.
Thanks in advance for all replies. Have a good day!
Edit: How active is this forum?
Replies
Mudbox does only two things better then ZBrush; Painting, and the viewport. If you care about painting though, there are much better options available atp. And the viewport isn't enough reason to use it over ZBrush.
It's easier to check proportions against photo reference in Mudbox's viewport because it uses a real camera with a real perspective projection. This point doesn't matter much to me because I'm used to working in orthographic 99% of the time.
For texturing I prefer Krita for base color and photo/painted normals. However, I prefer Zbrush over any other program to at least start the gloss map because its masking features and clay-based brushes set to RGB and with Z off are ideal for capturing details from the underlying geometry.
If I had to pick one sculpting program I'd pick Zbrush. If I had to pick two I'd probably pick Zbrush and 3D Coat, because I think 3D Coat adds more to Zbrush than Mudbox does. But, if I had a hero piece I was working on that I knew was going to go through a lot of iteration and art direction, and if it made sense for that hero piece to have a conventional base mesh, I would pick Mudbox to sculpt it maybe 80% of the time because of its superior layer system for sculpting.
Mudbox's painting isn't particularly easier than Zbrush, but its layer system has blending modes other than Normal which is a real blessing. Also, if you need to paint huge amounts of detail with multi-tile textures Mudbox handles that amount of data better than Zbrush.
Mudbox can stand alone as a sculpting package and since you already have it I don't think it's worth it to get Zbrush. But if you feel like it sometime down the line it might be good to learn Zbrush anyway. It's a very special program.
On the other hand, it`s a complex piece of software which is not novice-friendly, but Pixologic has great training resources and a very helpful community.
Mudbox hasn`t received any new features for years, and its functionality is being slowly intergrated into Maya by Autodesk.
Use Mudbox if you already have it, learn the basics. Later, if you fall in love with sculpting - get Zbrush ASAP. But if you lean more towards animation, rigging or some other stuff - Mudbox will do fine. As for the painting side - I didn`t like MBox for texturing/painting back in 2011, nowadays there are much better options (substance suite, quixel suite, 3d coat, Mari).