jepp you are hovering over an area and select all faces on a uv tile (not shell) with shift+A...
you can map the rectangle selectin on a key... but im affraid you have to use the face selection mode...
im reporting now some of these issues... again...
i've always found it quite frustrating that you couldn't sculpt across multiple objects in zb ( outside of them being shells belonging to the same tool of course ). is this possible in MB 2011 ?
no you cant sulpt across multiple objects... but you can paint across...
right on man, glad your digging it, i apologize for the shitty video quality, i will try and upload a better quality one later, i was also using a mouse as my wacom pen died on me... it felt a bit weird using a mouse for something like this.
that sucks jam, i feel your pain though.... my world's smallest violin died this week. shit sux. :P
that looks really slick.... i'd like to see some more of that. MB keeps shaping up to be a tool i really gotta, wanna, needa, gotta sink my teeth into.
Hey Jam thank you so much for posting all this. Being able to pose is huge, and the scaling is fantastic too, it will really help character design. Its cool to see Mud catching up with Z in such aspects.
One question for you : Once you create the green 'transpose' selections isolating the arms/legs, is there a way to have mudbox generate a simple parent>child rig out of it? I understand that mud 2011 can import fbx rigs but thought it would be great if it could generate them too.
Can't wait to see .fbx basemeshes appear around the net with pose/stretch capabilities. I could even see this as a motivation for innovative software programmers to come up with simplified rigging applications outputting mud compatible rigs. Like a xnormal/crazybump equivalent to character setup ...
Anyways, can't wait to upgrade, hoping its not too expensive this time around.
Hey pior as far as i know mudbox 2011 allows you to bring in rigged characters for modifications via fbx. I am not aware the extent of the implementation of the feature.
What I want to know is can you copy/paste/clone objects yet? Also, has symmetry been fixed? It still had a tendency to break in 2010. Or maybe a re-symmetrize function has been added to deal with it?
Might as well ask a few other questions while am at it. Is their a way to set a hotkey for Steady Stroke, or one for the color picker? Also for texturing, how do you freeze by UV shell, and can you freeze by the applied textures rgb intensity?
I didnt find these options when I tried mud2010 a while back, but maybe I just missed them or they're included in 2011...also hoping file sizes are smaller, they tended to be HUGE in previous versions.
How about that work flow thing I talked about last page? Do they allow you to jump in divisions and still use larger brushes, and make larger edits at say div level 3-5? Is it still painfully slow to do that?
that depends on your hardware... shifting millions of vertices needs cpu power...
zbrush is an exception... cause its not working like all the other tools...
Does my computer have to be really fast, to be able to do the same job in MB, that I can do fluently in ZB? I can edit rather easily, about 15 mil poly's in ZB. I know that's not a huge amount by today's standards, but can I work with the same amount in mudbox?
I guess my point is this: I've used mudbox quite a bit, and I like most everything about it. I really like the way it allows you to paint on your mesh, it seems a lot more intuitive, and less buggy than zbrush. But if I can't use the workflow I want, and instead get locked down to one way to do things, why should I use it?
I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm looking for a real answer. I guess if MB2011 handles poly's the same way 2010 does, I could get teh 2010 demo if it exists, and check myself. Just thought of that...
. . . Is their a way to set a hotkey for Steady Stroke
this is the sort of thing i really want to be able to sticky key. just doesn't feel to me like they're trying to develop fully flexible workflows right now ( knowing how ignorant saying that is without having seen this version )
we have zbrush. which in the viewport has presented some nice little tricks to establish a pretty quick way of working ( we'll leave the subject of navigation aside for the moment ). it's when you go outside into the palettes and ui it's just an absolute mess
and we have mudbox. which adopts refreshingly standard principles in its ui. but doesn't appear to want to do anything to explore sculpting_centric rapid workflows. maya artisan on acid ( or worse than that even since if you pushed the power of mudbox into artisan you'd have access to mel etc )
each just seems to cling so stubbornly to either end of the spectrum. frustrating
I guess if MB2011 handles poly's the same way 2010 does, I could get teh 2010 demo if it exists, and check myself. Just thought of that...
in mud2011 is the perfrmance a bit better with more objects... (only with new built scenes)... but the raw poly power is nearly the same... so get the 2010 demo and take a look...
ust doesn't feel to me like they're trying to develop fully flexible workflows right now
they are doing it... there is an viewport LOD system that splits your object into patches... there is no other tool dealing with such high "real" poly count...
there is a big differents between mud and z brush... in the zbrush viewport all is fake... its not dealing with "real" geometry like all the other tools... in some parts thats really cool and give much power to zbrush... but in mudbox you are able to match cameras and image planes... and import them from maya or max... also a riged char... you can use it for mate painting cause youa re able to import the exact same scene you are rendering after... dealing with object and geometry the same way like maya is one fo the core featuers of mudbox...
mudbox will never behave like zbrush and the other way around...
use both like me or make your decision...
and suggest the features you are missing...
in the help menue --> suggest a feature
they are tracking all those sugs and if a feature get more votes it became a higher priority...
I've spent the last couple days testing out Mudbox 2010 demo, trying to give it a fare shake as to how it would work with my work flow. I started a posed digital maquette style model. I was able to divide to about 1 mil poly's, and start sculpting the way I like. That was great. I could move the points, carve in forms, everything I normally do. It felt awesome, doing work on mudbox. It just "felt" right.
Then I divided one more time, and that's when the problems began. 4 mil poly's and I got MASSIVE chug. It's un-workable now. It's really disappointing cause I work like that. I was so happy with the way things were going, then I got hit with god awful performance at 4 mil poly's.
I'm not one of those noobs who thinks higher polycount = better model, but 4 mil poly's is well below standard sculpt requirements these days. Like I said, I so want to like mudbox, but it's the simple things like this that keep me from being able to use it. I was really loving the feel of mudbox up till that last division... So disappointed.
I'm upping the mud file in a rar on rapidshare, it's about 120mb's, but I'll post the link when it's done. Just as an aside, my rig is about 2 and a half to 3 years old, 4gb's ram, geforce 8600gts. I know that's not a great rig, but it should be able to handle 4 mil poly's AT LEAST.
Anyway, will edit this post when upload is done.
[EDIT] Here's the link. Don't have a rapidshare account, so it can only be downloaded 10 times, so unless you think you might be able to help, please leave it to the people who can, thanks
[EDIT 2] Looks like I might be functionally retarded. I put a bit of lighting on the scene, just as a test, and never took it off. I'll bet that's the major reason for the 4-5 FPS I was getting. Any way to go back to default lighting?
ok to be fair... mud needs highend hardware...
im working here on a HP Z800 workstation dual xeon, 24gig ram and a 8800GTX...
but in higher polycounts (20mio) there is no way to work on large areas...
you have to step down... which i think is not so bad cause the model dont gets so blobby...
@jeremy
delete all ibl lights and turn shadows off...
set the light color back to withe..
and there should be a default light setup...
ok to be fair... mud needs highend hardware...
im working here on a HP Z800 workstation dual xeon, 24gig ram and a 8800GTX...
That was the second reason I walked away from mudbox, I was one of the first people to buy mudbox 1 and it was awesome and the forums helpful and full of talent. Then autodesk and mudbox 2 came out and suddenly Im being told my hardware cant run mudbox anymore, I guess they just changed the direction of the company towards a more elite target market but to me thats really really bad customer service. Anyway the demo runs on my new machine and I like it alot I just cant come anywhere near affording to buy it.
Jeremy as far as I know mudbox has always required you to work with big brushes at lower subdivisions and very small brushes at higher subdivisions my old machine(single core 2.4GHZ 8800GT 3GB ram) could only get up to about 6-8 million polys before mudbox1 was completely unusable.
Hey Jeremy so I DLed the file, removed the lights and resaved but still it was not as responsive as it should be around the 4 million mark (your level4) and subdividing to 16milions was simply annoying to work with as you say. Viewport just wasn't smooth.
Now to compare I took the default bull and default human body meshes and subdivided them to see what happens ... and at respectively 33 and 44 millions it was still completely fast and responsive! like, 60fps.
So my guess is that your basemesh is just too dense for a level0 piece of geometry. I think its like 20k or so already. With that I think you'll get some very nice details with just a few levels of subdivision (4 milions is already dense enough imo) but if you want to use Mudbox to its maximum potential you would have to either work from lower density cages altogether, or start the way you like then at some point reproject everything to a lighter basemesh. Topogun can do that very well.
Try this: Go to Windows>Preferences>Files> and set "Enable Preprocession on Load" to 1. Now import the base mesh and subdivide to the density you want and see if it works better.
Jeremy as far as I know mudbox has always required you to work with big brushes at lower subdivisions and very small brushes at higher subdivisions my old machine(single core 2.4GHZ 8800GT 3GB ram) could only get up to about 6-8 million polys before mudbox1 was completely unusable.
That's what I was wanting to test. I don't like that "forced" work flow. This is going to sound arrogant, and bad, but I really don't mean in a bad way. I know that work flow works great, everyone's seen the results, but it's not the only way. Cesar Decol JR. does it the way I do, Rick Baker does it the way I do, several other great artists divide a few times before starting any real work. It's not up to the software to tell you how to do your job, it's supposed to let you do your job. Also I gotta agree with you on your first point. having to have super-duper hardware is not the way to go. I don't know about a lot of you here, but I'd much rather spend my money on other things than upgrading my computer. Especially for a single piece of software.
Pior: Thanks a bunch for taking the time, it's much appreciated. Let me see if I'm understanding you, my level0 mesh is too dense at 20k poly,s so that's kinda slowing me down in later division levels? You say reproject everything to a lower density base, does that mean project a displacement map to the lower base, then divide that lower base up again, apply the disp map to get the details back, then go to work on it again in mudbox?
Anyway, thanks for the help guys. If I can get mudbox working the way I want it to, that'd be great! I rea;;y do like the "Feel" of it a lot better.
-export whatever res from mud to topogun
-create a new 'superlow' cage in topogun with the retopo tools
-subdivide this once or more in topogun, thus matching all the details from the 'high'
-once you have say, 2 or 3 levels regenerated by Topogun, you can export them as obj.
-in mud, import the first one ; subdivide it ;
-import the second one,
and so on.
This way you end up with a fonctionnal mesh in mud that you can step up and step down the regular way.
I tried doing this through disp maps once, I know than in theory its possible but in my case it failed and I gave up. The Topogun export technique should work tho!!
Ok, I'll give that a go, thanks. I was gonna complain about having to buy topogun, but that really seems like a must have piece of software anyway, and for only $100, there's no way I could complain.
This is probably gonna take a while, so I'll post how things go. Thanks again.
Jeremy-S...just to throw in a monkey-wrench, check out 3d-coat as well as Topogun...retopo
there, plus you'll get another couple of options (voxels, lowpoly per-pixel painting, blah, blah, blah)
that you won't have in Mud.
wow oglu, ur PC spec will definitely have no issue running mudbox with dense geometry.
I'm with the same wagon with those who have decent spec. It's nice and awesome to see the demo and all new features but when you have your hands on, it started to lag and sculpting feels 'heavy'.
You need quadro's to really get into mudbox's sweetspot I'm running on a beast of a machine (i7 @ 3.4ghz, 12gbs ram and ati 5870) and can barely match what I get with Z...which is a shame cause I really love sculpting in mud...
On my desktop rig (E8200 @ 3.8ghz, 6gb ram, and 8800gt 512) Mudbox 2010 crushes Zbrush in speed and polycount. Zbrush starts to chug at about 8-12 million polys while Mudbox doesn't even break a sweat at around 32 million.
After losing the lighting stuff I had on that scene, I can get 60fps on 4 mil poly's now, and the next div is a little slow, but that's not something I was surprised to see. It happens in ZB sometimes too.
Using Topogun was quite weird. Had to get used to some of the tricks in that one. Tried 3dCoat demo, and while it's nice, I don't see myself having it in regular work flow rotation in it's current incarnation. Couldn't make sense of the retopo tools, the sculpting was wonky as sin, and it just didn't feel right. I'm sure I'll adopt it someday, but not now.
Anyway, I think I got Mudbox in a place where it's workable. I'm not looking to go to 32 mil poly's, more like 15-20 and that's for more extreme jobs. Still not sure I wanna pay the extra money for it, over ZB though. I could do a lot with that extra $400 or so.
What's going to happen when Pixologic finally release a 64bit version of Zbrush?
The stats required for Mudbox are really quite astonishing.
I was really hoping to get into Mudbox a bit more but with those requirements and the poor brushes it's still disappointing.
I second 3D coat as a good Mudbox alternative as well, still not quite my cup of tea compared to ZB but for the price it's a real option versus MB.
I'm no expert, but i recall that the way zbrush works is by using RAM to process those polygons. and I'm pretty sure that mudbox being an Autodesk software doesnt rely on the RAM like zbrush does, perhaps it uses the CPU? Just a thought, as Entitys com has a lot of ram.
Crasong : I wish cpu power was a major factor in mudbox's performance, but sadly that's not the case. Mud seems to be heavily optimised for quadro's..while zbrush uses your pc's cpu and ram..which is awesome because I have plenty of those. All I can say is I can't wait for a 64bit version of Zbrush to be released..because i'd rather upgrade my ram than having to buy those expensive workstation graphic cards
Entity: Ah, gotcha. Yeah Pixologic got it right when they realised that RAM is much more readily available to swap out, whereas GFXs are definitely not something that the average consumer would be able to upgrade on a whim. I've just upgraded to a 64 bit i7 machine myself from a 5 year old duo core rig which was dying. only thing left to change is my 8800GT which is holding up pretty okay, but that fan runs loud under the slightest load now, and I plan to get an nvidia 480, seeing that I've already waited this long.
If you increase the actual canvas size to the viewport res equivalent in Mudbox and then zoom in Zbrush runs like shit too.
The poor performance in Mudbox is something that bugs me but at least that forces you to work on the important lower res forms before getting stupid with detail. Something most could do with learning.
That canvas thing is true, but i've always been comfortable with the the default canvas size as well
While it's true that everyone should learn to focus on important forms first, there are many who have mastered that stage and prefer to sculpt midres. Jeremy's post comes to mind..
That's what I was wanting to test. I don't like that "forced" work flow. This is going to sound arrogant, and bad, but I really don't mean in a bad way. I know that work flow works great, everyone's seen the results, but it's not the only way. Cesar Decol JR. does it the way I do, Rick Baker does it the way I do, several other great artists divide a few times before starting any real work.
IronBearXL:
I actually like the voxel stuff in 3DC.
True it took a bit of getting used too but in the end it was really quite cool.
But no its not on par with ZB for me but I found it a good 'cheap' Mudbox replacement.
I've never experienced major slowdown issues with the viewport at a higher resolution in ZB, I have mine @ 1500 x something.
What does MB rely on for speed, Ram, CPU, video card?
I'd really like to do a proper test with it were speed is out of the equation, there are some great tools/pipelines I'd like to have a real stab at.
Multiple meshes - CPU
Size of Sculpt brush - CPU
Sculpting/Subdivision levels - RAM
Painting/Stamps/Stencils - VIDEO RAM
Display/Rendering Effects - VIDEO RAM
With some mesh management (hiding/freezing/) I can get a few million for my characters. 5 million +
I would love some more RAM and more VIDEO RAM though.
Currently running:
AMD Dual Core 2.6 Ghz
2 Gigs RAM
ATI 3850 256MB
30 Million + for a single mesh? Are you guys really sculpting efficiently at that resolution ? If you are you'd really need some powerful workstations.
@Fuse: I completely forgot about the grid thing. I just did a quick test, as it was hidden before, and keeping it hidden gave me better performance. Not completely noticeable, but it might be more noticeable when in higher division levels.
Mudbox for me, is working pretty damn good, now that I understand it a bit better. And if mudbox 2011 handles poly's better, then I'm all for it. I guess the only sticking point for me now is, that price point. Just think of all the things you could do with an extra $400 in your pocket. Or should I think of all the things I could do with the really cool results I get with mudbox instead? God, I think too much.....
Which one do you prefer? I can't say i can outline every feature that zbrush 4 would eventually have, and what thats worth compared to features that mudbox 2011 will have, take into account the release dates(which i dont know either =x) on top of pc hardware releases.
Timing can be everything if you want to spend cash for the best bang for buck without slapping yourself silly cause a much better deal came out within a month or two after you spent a bomb.
one thing im loving about mudbox is the way you work directly with common format texture files when painting. There is no proprietary internal texture format. everything is just saved as tifs in a subfolder next to the mudbox file. Damn awesome!
3DC is a great program, Where mudbox has great speed in painting 3DC has a massive array of tools, and you can paint in Bump,spec, and diffuse simultaniously.
What kills 3DC is you can only work on 1 texture file at a time. and the bump/spec channels are awkward to edit. plus the spec is greyscale
On my system a 4k tile is pretty slow in 3DC , In mudbox i can use much larger brushes and multiple 4k tiles without lag. plus mudbox lets you load/unload texture tiles from the gfx card so you can have as many tiles in your scene as you want. I just wish there was a symmetrical clone brush like 3DC
new video! again forgive me for the shitty quality still trying to figure out the popper settings for uploading, and also check out some of the other videos there are some cool stuff showing off texturing and such from some great artists.
Replies
you can map the rectangle selectin on a key... but im affraid you have to use the face selection mode...
im reporting now some of these issues... again...
no you cant sulpt across multiple objects... but you can paint across...
right on man, glad your digging it, i apologize for the shitty video quality, i will try and upload a better quality one later, i was also using a mouse as my wacom pen died on me... it felt a bit weird using a mouse for something like this.
that looks really slick.... i'd like to see some more of that. MB keeps shaping up to be a tool i really gotta, wanna, needa, gotta sink my teeth into.
One question for you : Once you create the green 'transpose' selections isolating the arms/legs, is there a way to have mudbox generate a simple parent>child rig out of it? I understand that mud 2011 can import fbx rigs but thought it would be great if it could generate them too.
Can't wait to see .fbx basemeshes appear around the net with pose/stretch capabilities. I could even see this as a motivation for innovative software programmers to come up with simplified rigging applications outputting mud compatible rigs. Like a xnormal/crazybump equivalent to character setup ...
Anyways, can't wait to upgrade, hoping its not too expensive this time around.
and then in the layer tab > mirror X...
and no there is no way to copy objects...
And when is it out?
Might as well ask a few other questions while am at it. Is their a way to set a hotkey for Steady Stroke, or one for the color picker? Also for texturing, how do you freeze by UV shell, and can you freeze by the applied textures rgb intensity?
I didnt find these options when I tried mud2010 a while back, but maybe I just missed them or they're included in 2011...also hoping file sizes are smaller, they tended to be HUGE in previous versions.
can you explain this a bit more...?
or made a short vid...
mudbox isnt 100% symmetrical during sculpting...
most of the time you dont want this anyways...
mirror is in there since mud2009...
zbrush is an exception... cause its not working like all the other tools...
I guess my point is this: I've used mudbox quite a bit, and I like most everything about it. I really like the way it allows you to paint on your mesh, it seems a lot more intuitive, and less buggy than zbrush. But if I can't use the workflow I want, and instead get locked down to one way to do things, why should I use it?
I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm looking for a real answer. I guess if MB2011 handles poly's the same way 2010 does, I could get teh 2010 demo if it exists, and check myself. Just thought of that...
this is the sort of thing i really want to be able to sticky key. just doesn't feel to me like they're trying to develop fully flexible workflows right now ( knowing how ignorant saying that is without having seen this version )
we have zbrush. which in the viewport has presented some nice little tricks to establish a pretty quick way of working ( we'll leave the subject of navigation aside for the moment ). it's when you go outside into the palettes and ui it's just an absolute mess
and we have mudbox. which adopts refreshingly standard principles in its ui. but doesn't appear to want to do anything to explore sculpting_centric rapid workflows. maya artisan on acid ( or worse than that even since if you pushed the power of mudbox into artisan you'd have access to mel etc )
each just seems to cling so stubbornly to either end of the spectrum. frustrating
in mud2011 is the perfrmance a bit better with more objects... (only with new built scenes)... but the raw poly power is nearly the same... so get the 2010 demo and take a look...
they are doing it... there is an viewport LOD system that splits your object into patches... there is no other tool dealing with such high "real" poly count...
there is a big differents between mud and z brush... in the zbrush viewport all is fake... its not dealing with "real" geometry like all the other tools... in some parts thats really cool and give much power to zbrush... but in mudbox you are able to match cameras and image planes... and import them from maya or max... also a riged char... you can use it for mate painting cause youa re able to import the exact same scene you are rendering after... dealing with object and geometry the same way like maya is one fo the core featuers of mudbox...
mudbox will never behave like zbrush and the other way around...
use both like me or make your decision...
and suggest the features you are missing...
in the help menue --> suggest a feature
they are tracking all those sugs and if a feature get more votes it became a higher priority...
Then I divided one more time, and that's when the problems began. 4 mil poly's and I got MASSIVE chug. It's un-workable now. It's really disappointing cause I work like that. I was so happy with the way things were going, then I got hit with god awful performance at 4 mil poly's.
I'm not one of those noobs who thinks higher polycount = better model, but 4 mil poly's is well below standard sculpt requirements these days. Like I said, I so want to like mudbox, but it's the simple things like this that keep me from being able to use it. I was really loving the feel of mudbox up till that last division... So disappointed.
Anyway, will edit this post when upload is done.
[EDIT] Here's the link. Don't have a rapidshare account, so it can only be downloaded 10 times, so unless you think you might be able to help, please leave it to the people who can, thanks
http://rapidshare.com/files/368220342/SpiderZero-Ripoff_01.rar.html
[EDIT 2] Looks like I might be functionally retarded. I put a bit of lighting on the scene, just as a test, and never took it off. I'll bet that's the major reason for the 4-5 FPS I was getting. Any way to go back to default lighting?
im working here on a HP Z800 workstation dual xeon, 24gig ram and a 8800GTX...
but in higher polycounts (20mio) there is no way to work on large areas...
you have to step down... which i think is not so bad cause the model dont gets so blobby...
@jeremy
delete all ibl lights and turn shadows off...
set the light color back to withe..
and there should be a default light setup...
That was the second reason I walked away from mudbox, I was one of the first people to buy mudbox 1 and it was awesome and the forums helpful and full of talent. Then autodesk and mudbox 2 came out and suddenly Im being told my hardware cant run mudbox anymore, I guess they just changed the direction of the company towards a more elite target market but to me thats really really bad customer service. Anyway the demo runs on my new machine and I like it alot I just cant come anywhere near affording to buy it.
Jeremy as far as I know mudbox has always required you to work with big brushes at lower subdivisions and very small brushes at higher subdivisions my old machine(single core 2.4GHZ 8800GT 3GB ram) could only get up to about 6-8 million polys before mudbox1 was completely unusable.
Now to compare I took the default bull and default human body meshes and subdivided them to see what happens ... and at respectively 33 and 44 millions it was still completely fast and responsive! like, 60fps.
So my guess is that your basemesh is just too dense for a level0 piece of geometry. I think its like 20k or so already. With that I think you'll get some very nice details with just a few levels of subdivision (4 milions is already dense enough imo) but if you want to use Mudbox to its maximum potential you would have to either work from lower density cages altogether, or start the way you like then at some point reproject everything to a lighter basemesh. Topogun can do that very well.
Hope this helps!
That's what I was wanting to test. I don't like that "forced" work flow. This is going to sound arrogant, and bad, but I really don't mean in a bad way. I know that work flow works great, everyone's seen the results, but it's not the only way. Cesar Decol JR. does it the way I do, Rick Baker does it the way I do, several other great artists divide a few times before starting any real work. It's not up to the software to tell you how to do your job, it's supposed to let you do your job. Also I gotta agree with you on your first point. having to have super-duper hardware is not the way to go. I don't know about a lot of you here, but I'd much rather spend my money on other things than upgrading my computer. Especially for a single piece of software.
Pior: Thanks a bunch for taking the time, it's much appreciated. Let me see if I'm understanding you, my level0 mesh is too dense at 20k poly,s so that's kinda slowing me down in later division levels? You say reproject everything to a lower density base, does that mean project a displacement map to the lower base, then divide that lower base up again, apply the disp map to get the details back, then go to work on it again in mudbox?
Anyway, thanks for the help guys. If I can get mudbox working the way I want it to, that'd be great! I rea;;y do like the "Feel" of it a lot better.
-export whatever res from mud to topogun
-create a new 'superlow' cage in topogun with the retopo tools
-subdivide this once or more in topogun, thus matching all the details from the 'high'
-once you have say, 2 or 3 levels regenerated by Topogun, you can export them as obj.
-in mud, import the first one ; subdivide it ;
-import the second one,
and so on.
This way you end up with a fonctionnal mesh in mud that you can step up and step down the regular way.
I tried doing this through disp maps once, I know than in theory its possible but in my case it failed and I gave up. The Topogun export technique should work tho!!
This is probably gonna take a while, so I'll post how things go. Thanks again.
there, plus you'll get another couple of options (voxels, lowpoly per-pixel painting, blah, blah, blah)
that you won't have in Mud.
I'm with the same wagon with those who have decent spec. It's nice and awesome to see the demo and all new features but when you have your hands on, it started to lag and sculpting feels 'heavy'.
Using Topogun was quite weird. Had to get used to some of the tricks in that one. Tried 3dCoat demo, and while it's nice, I don't see myself having it in regular work flow rotation in it's current incarnation. Couldn't make sense of the retopo tools, the sculpting was wonky as sin, and it just didn't feel right. I'm sure I'll adopt it someday, but not now.
Anyway, I think I got Mudbox in a place where it's workable. I'm not looking to go to 32 mil poly's, more like 15-20 and that's for more extreme jobs. Still not sure I wanna pay the extra money for it, over ZB though. I could do a lot with that extra $400 or so.
The stats required for Mudbox are really quite astonishing.
I was really hoping to get into Mudbox a bit more but with those requirements and the poor brushes it's still disappointing.
I second 3D coat as a good Mudbox alternative as well, still not quite my cup of tea compared to ZB but for the price it's a real option versus MB.
Last I tried 3dc's voxel sculpting (around a month and a half ago) it was getting better, but not at all at the level of Mudbox or Zbrush yet.
I'm no expert, but i recall that the way zbrush works is by using RAM to process those polygons. and I'm pretty sure that mudbox being an Autodesk software doesnt rely on the RAM like zbrush does, perhaps it uses the CPU? Just a thought, as Entitys com has a lot of ram.
The poor performance in Mudbox is something that bugs me but at least that forces you to work on the important lower res forms before getting stupid with detail. Something most could do with learning.
While it's true that everyone should learn to focus on important forms first, there are many who have mastered that stage and prefer to sculpt midres. Jeremy's post comes to mind..
I actually like the voxel stuff in 3DC.
True it took a bit of getting used too but in the end it was really quite cool.
But no its not on par with ZB for me but I found it a good 'cheap' Mudbox replacement.
I've never experienced major slowdown issues with the viewport at a higher resolution in ZB, I have mine @ 1500 x something.
What does MB rely on for speed, Ram, CPU, video card?
I'd really like to do a proper test with it were speed is out of the equation, there are some great tools/pipelines I'd like to have a real stab at.
Size of Sculpt brush - CPU
Sculpting/Subdivision levels - RAM
Painting/Stamps/Stencils - VIDEO RAM
Display/Rendering Effects - VIDEO RAM
With some mesh management (hiding/freezing/) I can get a few million for my characters. 5 million +
I would love some more RAM and more VIDEO RAM though.
Currently running:
AMD Dual Core 2.6 Ghz
2 Gigs RAM
ATI 3850 256MB
30 Million + for a single mesh? Are you guys really sculpting efficiently at that resolution ? If you are you'd really need some powerful workstations.
Mudbox for me, is working pretty damn good, now that I understand it a bit better. And if mudbox 2011 handles poly's better, then I'm all for it. I guess the only sticking point for me now is, that price point. Just think of all the things you could do with an extra $400 in your pocket. Or should I think of all the things I could do with the really cool results I get with mudbox instead? God, I think too much.....
Timing can be everything if you want to spend cash for the best bang for buck without slapping yourself silly cause a much better deal came out within a month or two after you spent a bomb.
3DC is a great program, Where mudbox has great speed in painting 3DC has a massive array of tools, and you can paint in Bump,spec, and diffuse simultaniously.
What kills 3DC is you can only work on 1 texture file at a time. and the bump/spec channels are awkward to edit. plus the spec is greyscale
On my system a 4k tile is pretty slow in 3DC
http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/revising_sketch_pt1-1
i'll be doing more with this guy, just got to free up some time as i'm currently crunching away at work!!
it just says access denied on those links
edit: ok got a password, nice video jam, the ones on creature workflow are cool as well