Sculpting question - Zbrush slower than Blender?

monitorhero

Hello guys,

I come from Blender sculpting and recently tried ZBrush. I actually prefer ZBrush because of the many options and tools it has, but the performance is worse than Blender even though I always heard ZBrush could handle so much more polygons. 

Now I am confused because I found out it is the opposite. Blender is slightly faster.

I sculpted a mesh in ZBrush and subdivided it to 17 million polygons.I imported the same sculpt to Blender.
The navigation in ZBrush gets really slow and also the brushstrokes are dragging behind.

Can anyone confirm my findings? Is there a way to improve performance in ZBrush or an option I am missing? I am not using dynamic subdivision in ZBrush. With dynamic subdivsions turned on it's impossible to do a single stroke with 17million polygons.

Greetings
monitorhero

mod edit: changed clickbait title.

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monitorhero

Hey TeriyakiStyle,

I didn't subdivide beyond 17 million. It was just for testing purposes. Usually I never reach that many polygons but it would be nice to have that possibility. I am just confused because I heard that Blender couldn't handle that many polygons in the viewport but it handels them better than ZBrush. Which goes against everything I heard regarding sculpting with both.

Sunray

how much ram do you have I have 16 and I can work with 30 mil+ polys. I can't belive blender could handle more polys maybe you messed something up in settings. You should also try tool:geo:modify topology:check mesh and fix mesh. 

JedTheKrampus

Probably Zbrush will feel more responsive if there are multiple subdivision levels and Blender will feel more responsive if there are none. So when you send stuff back to Zbrush you should probably rebuild subdivision levels if there are subdivision levels to rebuild.

monitorhero

@Sunray I have 16gb as well. I may try reinstalling ZBrush tomorrow and see if that changes something. But I didn't change anything except for some shortcuts and custom menus. I am using the 64bit version btw
@JedTheKrampus Sorry that I didn't mention this in my original post. I built the model in ZBrush with multiple subdiv levels. But Blender also has a multiresolution modifier kinda like ZBrush. I loaded the highres model from Zbrush into Blender and sculpted on it and also loaded the "lowres" model and subdivided it with Blenders modifier. Blender is still more responsive either way.

It would be nice if someone who uses Blender could try to load a Zbrush made model into Blender with the same kind of polycount and use the sculpting tools inside Blender and tell me if they are more or less responsive than ZBrush.

pior

Post your examples files. There are of course a ton of factors at play here, but most importantly : the two programs use completely different ressources.

My personal experience is quite different from yours. My CPU is in need of an upgrade (meaning that my Zbrush is on the slow side), but my videocard is brand new (meaning that the Blender viewport is lighting fast). But still, Zbrush is an order of magnitude faster than Blender on my machine when it comes to sculpting at high levels. I actually never sculpt in Blender with proper levels, and only use Dyntopo - which is certainly very consistent and reliable when used in a conservative manner.

One thing for certain : the Blender viewport will always have consistent framerate whereas the Zbrush viewport tends to lag when zooming in. One way to make Zbrush about 2x faster is to enable Preferences > Performance > QuickAndDirtyEdit mode.

Overall, quick bruteforce test don't really mean anything anyways. What really matters is whether or not once can work in a fluid 60fps manner over the whole course of a month-long complex project.

Also, one thing I've noticed is that quite a few Zbrush users seem to be okay with slow viewport performance. Whereas if you come from a sculpting program with consistent and predictable viewport performance you might be less likely to let that slide.

monitorhero

@pior My CPU is also very old though it should be fine. It's an Intel 2600k. So Blenders viewport navigation is accelerated by the GPU and everything that is sculpting and modeling related is using the CPU (also Brush strokes). The QuickAndDirtyEdit Mode is already enabled by default in ZBrush. There is also no need to post a file. You can experience the same problem with just exporting a sphere to Blender or subdividing a default Blender sphere. So it's not model dependent. Still my Blender viewport is way faster

pior

Yes, Blender is very fast when using the Multires modifier on something like a clean quad model. But for instance if you apply a multires modifier to a piece of geometry that has been decimated, sculpting will slow down to a crawl even at low levels, whereas Zbrush will still behave in a workable manner. That's what was meant earlier by other posters - Bruteforce performance tests on a cube or sphere are simplistic and not necessarily representative of the workflow of a full project. Use what works best for you.

monitorhero

Thanks for the help pior. For sculpting I prefer ZBrush and so far I didn't reach that many polygons anyway. But I actually wanted to use ZBrush for high fidelity details since this should be the strength of ZBrush. Now I am starting to doubt that.

musashidan

Another factor that plays a major role in speed in ZB is your document/canvas size. If this is too large it can dramatically decrease response time. Especially if zoomed close to the tool.

Have no doubts, ZB is the sculpting king.  

monitorhero

@musashidan Yeah I have no doubt that it is the best sculpting tool but regrading peformance it is obviously not. I also have a fairly small document size with 1500x900
@pior I tried importing a decimated mesh into Blender and used Multires on it and it got a lot slower indeed. But decimating the mesh in ZBrush and subdividing it there had the same slowing effect.

I guess when I am reaching my limits in the future it will be time to upgrade my CPU. Thanks for the help everyone so far.

musashidan

Have you tried lowering your document size? Also, subdividing a decimated mesh? Was this just for performance testing reasons?

I haven't sculpted in Blender but the viewport performance sounds impressive from what you've said. 

I've been using ZB from version 1.55 on a very old computer up till now,  on a decent machine but far from top end. I often work on projects with many subtools and between 30-50 mill and find the performance to be no problem at all. Even on the old computer on 1.55 I got commendable performance for that time and hardware. 

And this is the reason why ZB was designed the way it was back then(2.5d canvas environment). Hardware limitations and enabling the ability to work on multi million meshes at a time when it was unheard of on a bog standard desktop. 

monitorhero

@musashidan Yeah it was just for performance testing. On all quad meshes like pior said it is really fast and I didn't see a difference between Blender and ZBrush.

So you work with Version 1.55 still? And do you mean 30-50 million polygons for each subtool or overall?