Anyone switched from ZBrush to Blender?
interpolator
After the acquisition of ZBrush by Maxon, I'm not willing to pay the large and permanent subscription fees for snail-pace upgrades, but not doing so means I'll have to stop using ZBrush eventually. Whether because it gets outpaced by other software, Maxon stops authorizing perpetual license installations on new hardware, or it just becomes incompatible with later hardware or OS updates. For all I know I won't even be able to install it on my next laptop in a couple years.
So I'm considering just switching right now and using Blender instead, since I'm not aware of a better alternative and it's free anyway.
I then started thinking that if I'm using Blender for sculpting anyway, then I may as well try replacing Maya with it as well.
I'm wondering if anyone else has made that transition and how well it worked out, or if there's a better alternative. Or I guess whether or not this is just a terrible idea.
I've been using Blender for a little while, and I've used it in the past. It does some stuff better, and a lot of stuff worse. It's perfectly functional, but I do miss ZBrush. I miss the marking menus from Maya too.
My experience is that, compared to ZBrush, Blender does have a much better interface, it's easier to customize, it has lots of plugins with much better integration, it uses real 3D without the jacked up perspective ZBrush has, and it's easier to do certain tasks like switching objects while sculpting.
But it also has annoyances like swapping workspaces to add new objects, random bugs that crop up in normal use and have to be squashed (like how the mirror modifier breaks sculpting brushes, and applying the modifier breaks the object origin), the awkward default controls that have to be remapped, the lack of polygroups and layers, or having all masking and clipping functions bound to various independant brushes.
But it's stuff I think I can live with so far, and they'll still keep improving it.
As far as replacing Maya, the modeling/retopology/UV mapping side of things seems fine enough. Though I haven't tried rigging or animating in Blender. At the very least, Blender looks a whole hell of a lot better and doesn't crash or break so much.
Drives me insane that it still makes such poor use of pie menus after all these years, and all the key binds can be overwhelming.
So I'm considering just switching right now and using Blender instead, since I'm not aware of a better alternative and it's free anyway.
I then started thinking that if I'm using Blender for sculpting anyway, then I may as well try replacing Maya with it as well.
I'm wondering if anyone else has made that transition and how well it worked out, or if there's a better alternative. Or I guess whether or not this is just a terrible idea.
I've been using Blender for a little while, and I've used it in the past. It does some stuff better, and a lot of stuff worse. It's perfectly functional, but I do miss ZBrush. I miss the marking menus from Maya too.
My experience is that, compared to ZBrush, Blender does have a much better interface, it's easier to customize, it has lots of plugins with much better integration, it uses real 3D without the jacked up perspective ZBrush has, and it's easier to do certain tasks like switching objects while sculpting.
But it also has annoyances like swapping workspaces to add new objects, random bugs that crop up in normal use and have to be squashed (like how the mirror modifier breaks sculpting brushes, and applying the modifier breaks the object origin), the awkward default controls that have to be remapped, the lack of polygroups and layers, or having all masking and clipping functions bound to various independant brushes.
But it's stuff I think I can live with so far, and they'll still keep improving it.
As far as replacing Maya, the modeling/retopology/UV mapping side of things seems fine enough. Though I haven't tried rigging or animating in Blender. At the very least, Blender looks a whole hell of a lot better and doesn't crash or break so much.
Drives me insane that it still makes such poor use of pie menus after all these years, and all the key binds can be overwhelming.
Replies
For my game dev needs, Blender has turned out to be a very suitable replacement for Maya. ZBrush on the other hand, not so much. Blender's sculpting tools are pretty good, but ZBrush has some nice to have features that Blender doesn't, and in my testing, ZBrush can handle waaaaaaaaaaaay higher polycounts than Blender. So, I let my Maya license expire. I haven't signed up for a Maxon ZBrush subscription and won't until/unless they add some new must have feature. Until then, I'll be using my ZBrush 2022 license and crossing my fingers that Blender's sculpting tools improve enough to make the switch for sculpting too.
Just my 2 cents. Hope that helps!
No need to do I/O and send your files to Keyshot or Redshift or whatever renderer there is.
I just do the standard thing like mark the seams then unwrap. follow active quads is just cool
Overall the UV tools are pretty good, but indeed the sync/no sync switch which may sound useful in theory is actually awful in practice and creates serious issues - since it can cause unwanted editing on the "other side" of a seam, so to speak. Like here, as manipulating the edges from one UV island would affect the corresponding ones on the other :
I've also recently ended up with an annoying error on a complex unwrap, as one piece was overlapping another but the lack of a proper "Show All UVs of currently selected object" caused me to miss it. So that too should be solved by better display options.
So overall the sync/no sync paradigm 100% has to go imho, and should be replaced by a set of straightforward display options (Show All UVs/Show Only Selected UVs).
Now one thing I find even more sorely missing is the ability to space selected UV verts evenly, like in the case of the selected edge here. Is there any addon for this ? I see suggestions of using the Relax brush or even Follow Active Quad, but these don't work in this common case. As far as I am concerned this is the one single thing that is missing - for my own personal workflow that is. The only straightforward workaround I know of consists of first manually snapping the outer verts to the grid, and then relax the rest with the Relax brush with borders locked. But that's still not a proper even spacing, since the snapping forces one to follow a square grid.
if I then deselect in the uv window, the poly faces in the 3d viewport will still remain selected.
if I am using sync all, I have to select by faces to move the islands around, but by vertex or edge to see where the edges connect, otherwise the connected edges will move also, so yeah toggling between vertex/edge and faces seems the best option.
MAYA has uv sync also, but you can select uv's rather than vertex, so you don't mess up the edges
i do agree though, it is a bit awkward and needs to be changed/improved
Overall maybe the best solution is just to buy the zen uv, which seems pretty good
https://blendermarket.com/products/zen-uv
The worst thing i find with uv mapping out of the box is the relax tools, spatially based, not angle based , so its really hard to get the uv squares the same size.(3ds max does it perfectly fine)
re sculpting I can manage ok, but the brushes have a different feel to zbrush which I am not entirelly comfortable wtih yet
I guess with practice you can get to the right standard
Is this not the behavior you guys are expecting?
Perhaps you have some extra option enabled, or some special relax brush settings ?
[edit] Alright, 3.6.x seems to have introduced a new setting for the UV Relax brush, making the relaxed UVs conform to the surface quality of the corresponding geometry. Meaning that if the geo follows a clean, flat grid, it will relax as such :
Now this is useful of course - but still not quite what one would expect, since there are many times when one may need to straighten parts as a squared frame or between arbitrary pinned verts in a way that does *not* conform to the surface quality of the geometry (like for instance all the Guilty Gear Xrd edge details) ...
So as far as I am concerned this goes back to the need for a "space evenly between two verts" tool and a few more specialized straightening tools too.
The above does show that there is work being done on the UV side though. Looks like it is just missing some clear focus/direction.
@pior
i did try something weird, ie pinning then re running unwrap.
It worked ok on a more complex mesh
better than relax brush anyway as you are defining the boundary and it more or less pays attention to the original geo and can minimize
distortion
There's always Follow Active Quad, based on one straightened poly in UV space, dictating the straightening of the surrounding - but that really does feel backwards (and limited) ...
https://imgur.com/a/Jwvuigk
grabbing 2 verts , pinning them and re running the unwrap( by angle)
gives better results and less distortion as 'by angle' is taking the 3d geometry in to account also
Not perfectly accurate , but you can keep on re- unwrapping/moving the pinned points until its ok
i wanted to equalize the uv's checkers so i could do a micro fibre bump on the sleeve
(cuffs need redoing tbh )
1- no proper support of polygroups in multires
2- dam standard brush
but just cycling through sub d levels takes forever. But overall its ok
I will stick with zbrush for now, but slowly learn the Blender worklow
This guy who I watch for his sculpting tutorials has totally switched over to Blender