Mudbox vs. Silo vs. Zbrush vs.....
polycounter lvl 19
Hey guys. I haven't spent much time with any of the polysculpting programs out there and now I'm looking on changing that, especially with the idea of challenges (mobster bust) being sculpt only. I was wondering if anyone had any opinions on which was the best program overall, which was the best for starting out, etc. Any thoughts will help. Thanks.
Replies
I don't really feel that Mudbox is "pathetic" at all. ZBrush has a lot of features that I never really used, nor did I have any reason to.
One thing to take into consideration is the fact that Mudbox is solely meant for sculpting high resolution models, and perhaps baking them into a low resolution mesh.
ZBrush isn't really a true 3D sculpting package. Pixologic has dubbed it to be "2.5D." It can be used to sculpt a 3D object, but at the same time, it can be used like Photoshop, to paint directly over or onto those objects. This is why it doesn't have a "perspective" viewport. All of it's viewports are orthographic.
If all you're concerned with is sculpting high resolution meshes, then Mudbox might be for you. ZBrush's extra features could be a help or a hindrance, depending on what kind of work you're planning on doing.
Also it just "feels" nicer to use personally.
Obviously I won't draw any comparisons with Silo, since Silo is primarily a modelling program, not a sculpting app. It has very good sculpting tools that feel fine, but it can't handle anywhere near as many polys as Mudbox or ZBrush.
Z3, lots of stuff in it (including perspective view now). Possibly better to learn this as it has more features and is harder to get to grips with. I would think a studio looking for people who can sculpt would think if you can do it in zbrush, then it would be no problem shifting you to mudbox, if that is what the studio uses. I've also heard many people not being able to get high polycounts in mudbox, in some cases being about what they can reach in silo. So you might want to do a bit of research and see if it's maybe component related and get an idea if your comp might suffer the same problem.
I was working on a model in Z3 yesterday composed of 9 subtools, each about 1-4 million polygons, so about 18 million in total. A bit sluggish at times with all tools visible, but you can just hide the views. Then there is the HD geometry. Currently no good for production as the details can't be extracted, but the new displacement exporter and zmapper are supposed to be able to do it (don't know when they are due for release). If you decide on learning zbrush, I strongly suggest going through tutorials DVDs such as the Gnomon ones or Kurv Studio one. If you try to learn the UI and workflow without them, I recommend a solid brick. So you'll have something at hand to smash your face with when required. However once you know the basics you can do a lot with that, then expand from there.
I would hardly say Silo has little functionality. As a SubD modeller it is excellent, it's all about workflow and customisation. I only tried the first beta (it's on about the 9th beta release now), but the sclupting felt pretty good back then, I'm sure it's a fair bit better now. A key thing with silo is being able to poly model and sculpt at the same time. It also has retopologising tools, uv mapping and normal mapping too.
And while i was holding off on Zbrush before, seeing as how Mudbox was so much more intuitive, the new features have me salivating, so i'm afraid i'm going to have to throw myself at it one more time in hopes of it clicking.
Much like mudbox when I first installed it though, I feel this new update to Zbrush has made Z3 a close 2nd in my list of apps to sculpt with.
Didn't get a chance to mess with the app totally as maybe Lupus has though I just installed it 1 hours ago and I am already posting about it seems to be a good thing, at least to me it is...
I played with Zbrush2 for about 1 to 2 days and I gave up on it but this new update makes me want to learn more, let's see what happens.
Good luck on your search.
Silo is the best SDS modeler I've used yet, and has become an important part of my process. Zbrush is great and ZappLink just takes it to the next level for me, texturing wise.
Mudbox has, for me at least, vastly superior poly pushing performance than either of the other 2 apps.
Mudbox costs 1/2 as much though because it only does 1/2 of the equation...no texturing.
I just purchased Zbrush3 and have yet to experiment with its new poly painting abilities. Its supposed to now handle massive numbers of polys better than Z2, but honestly for me the performance on ZB is still pretty poor. However... if the new sculpting tools are anywhere as easy as presented in the videos I'll never need Mudbox again.
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Mudbox costs 1/2 as much though because it only does 1/2 of the equation...no texturing.
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Mudbox actually seems to be the most expensive of the three apps.
Silo= Cheap, effective modeler with sculpting. My only gripe with Silo is that you are not going to get the level of detail sculpting that you can get in Mudbox or ZB3.....but it is a dam good poly modeler. Better than any other package at poly modeling imho due to it's fast, effective, non-bloated interface.
Mudbox= Great sculpting app. Really intuitive...you could pick it up and be sculpting away in no time with out even reading any documentation. The Non-Commercial license is quite affordable at 299. You can get a pretty high polycount in Mudbox with a relatively decent machine. There is already talk of Mudbox 2.0 comming out this year and it will include 3d texture painting. Whether or not it is a free upgrade is still up in the air though. Great at what it does though....
ZBrush 3= A power house of an application. With all of the added features and tools it is definetly worth the 489 price tag. It can achieve the highest amount of polygons out of the three applications. It really is an app that will just be getting better as time goes on and as the ZB community releases new ZPlugins (which are free)
you have to pick.
*edit to drunken post*
ZBrush = Has overy complicated controls+interface and as such takes a while to get used to. With zb3 tends to crash alot on some machines. Can handle considerably more geometry then mudbox, and has alot more features though.
Havn't used Silo, but the ability to do basic poly editing along side sculpting is a big plus it has over the competition.
at me, it's crashing only if i am using projection master
with model in Perspective mode.
Whargoul, your compo is crashy, and your ideas is crashy
not zb.
Z3.....not the same storey. I crashed it about 10 times in 5 minutes just trying to blur a mask on a model. And there have been other crashes for other things too.
It's great when it works, and I really like how the sculpting feels in it, but it needs an update to fix the stability and hopefully sort a few features out.
Erasing Layer Information
You can erase information in a Layer by using a morph target and the morph brush.
To do this take the following steps:
Turn off visibility for the layer you want to remove information from
Store a morph target by pressing Tool: Morph Target: Store MT
Select the morph brush
Turn the visibility back on for that layer
Paint out the area you want to remove
.
i'm no pro. but it's fucking disgusting that they'd expect gems like that to be welcome in a ' time is money ' environment. this is essentially the same workflow as in 2. one of the lesser sour grapes you'll swallow to have access to those polycounts
Delete other subd layers for each tooth so they're all now at level 1.
Clone each one.
Select first, tool>insert mesh, select the first clone.
It's a shame, as there is a lot of great stuff, but then this akward crap is there that just gets in the way, and makes it more complicated than it should be.
Select second, tool>insert mesh, slect the second clone etc. etc.
All that instead of just merging layers, as each tooth got put in a sperate layer when I copied one.