Mudbox vs. ZBrush

Zephir62

Having tried both programs, I can safely say that Mudbox is more user-friendly, has a very short learning curve, and is generally much easier to use out of the box than ZBrush. Because of the former, I find my experience using Mudbox actually FUN compared to the hassle of finding how to do something with ZBrush. Mudbox even has the same basic functionalities for the gaming industry(creating normal maps, etc.)

So what is it that makes ZBrush so popular compared to Mudbox? The only reason I can see is that ZBrush has scripting and customization abilities, neither of which I have delved into due to the huge learning curve of the program.

I'm sure someone here has a good opinion on the matter

Ruz

I actually prefer zbrush ,I even like the interface .
mudbox seems slower and buggier at the moment
probably at some point I Will get to know mudbox better, but for now zbrush is my best friend

huge learnng curve?, phhhah , learn the basics in an afternoon

Vitor

I will agree with Ruz, Zbrush here. The UI might seem a little different at first but after you get used it is fast and good enought. You may not have that 3d feeling you got with Mb, but it works faster in my opinion. For example rotating around a model seems faster to me with Zb than rotate in the 3d space as in Mb.
I'm sure you won't find a very good conclusion after this discussion as everyone has his own arguments and most of them are valid, the best would be try both and then see on which on you feel better.

Learnign curve? difficult UI? bah... easy programs are for the noobs

thomasp

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mudbox seems slower and buggier at the moment

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quoted for agreement. plus, Z does not only cover sculpting, so you have to live with it anyway.

James Edwards

Zbrush here too. Mudbox is definitely easier to learn out of the box though, no question.

rooster

mudbox, layers and perspective sculpting are things I am loathe to go without now

Rob Galanakis

Mudbox all the way. I find it can handle many more polys because it writes to HDD, 3D layers are fantastic, and the normal-grabber is fast and painless.
All I use ZBrush/Mudbox for is digital sculpting, and for that Mudbox wins easily for me.
ZBrush 2.5 may change things, though, it seems pretty cool, but really all I am looking for is pure sculpting, sans bells and whistles.
One thing I will give to ZBrush is, even though the UI can be confusing, the default hotkeys are far more intuitive.

jec1183

Out of the box it has to be Mudbox hands down just because of the ease of use. It is however much slower then zbrush when it comes to detailing.

I am going to have to pick zbrush currently only because it is currently faster, less buggy, and has the ability to paint and create highly detailed textures.

I feel however that I will be changing this vote when the next installment of Mudbox comes out. Mudbox is still just a beta program in my eyes, the next version will probably take a lot of the crits from this one to heart and add features such as texturing into the mix.

tacit math

zbrush. the only significant failing for me is the lack of true multiple object support in a ' real ' 3d environment ( which implies a camera / scene analogy ). if only they'd sorted that out a couple years back a. apart from that i feel the workflow's pretty slick. and there's a good number of sneaky little tricks you can pull to get detail into a mesh

arshlevon

i like them both.. i don't use zbrush for sculpting anymore though, but i love texturing and detailing in it and it makes much better displacement and normal maps than mudbox, also i love baking cavity maps for my texturing workflow.. so basically i am using zbrush as a texture/map baker and mudbox for sculpting. also i like doing my detailing in zbrush because on my machine i can always get more subdivsions in zbrush than i can in mudbox.

conte

could be really cool, to have mudbox with texture painter.