I am switching from Mudbox to Blender and need some advice!
polycounter lvl 6
Since Autodesk is not willing to address the space navigator driver issue with Mudbox i had no other choice then to switch to a sculpt software that support it aka Blender. I suffer a great deal from RSI and the 3d mouse save me from abandoning my career as a game developer.
I can now sculpt with silky smooth movement around my model with Blender.
So far what i like the most is the ability to stay in the same software to edit and sculpt the model by a simple button click, this is priceless to me since it saving me lot of click.
Another priceless addons i found was the boolean sculpt made specially for sculpt, before this tool i was spending insane amount of time to clean and fix meshes from 3ds max pro boolean and even after cleaning Mudbox was still very finicky about importing them. Now i can insert any meshes in another mesh and unite or divide them at will and they are ready to sculpt without a hick!
I will surely miss the auto retopo from Mudbox but maybe someone will come up with a solution eventually.
So to my question to people who have work in both : What would be the biggest drawbacks i will face with blender sculpting versus Mudbox?
Any tips are also welcome since we often learn a lot from these threads and it could help others.
Excuse my horrendous English
Replies
I think the biggest paradigm shift lies in the fact that Blender will force you to work on raw sculpts as opposed to working with levels of subdivision. There are two performance reasons for that : 1 - Blender is not able to edit/deform/manipulate models as dense as what Mudbox or Zbrush can do, and 2 - while functional, the multi-level subdivision/sculpting modifier is not stable or responsive enough once past a few subdivisions.
With that in mind, you will have to embrace Dyntopo sculpting. The good side effect of this is that it will force you to work in a very efficient manner, upresing (to add detail) and downresing (for clean surfacing) regions of a model as you progress. It sounds painful at first, but I find that this actually leads to very clean and lightweight models, looking as good if not better than the very dense models done in either Zbrush (dynamesh soup) or Mudbox (needlessly high levels of uniform subdivision).
The one tip I would give is to use the Nudge brush gently over an area in order to increase resolution when/where needed. I still have to investigate to see if there is a way to setup a dedicated upres/downres brush to work faster - but even without that, one can get great results out of the default brushes.
Overall I find the benefits of being able to sculpt directly into one's main program far outweigh the lack of special features found in Mudbox or Zbrush. I know that a lot of people are fine with the "bruteforce" approach of sculpting in a separate program, but being able to work non-linearly on both a low and highpoly model is really fantastic.
If anything, the weakest aspect of Blender sculpting is not really sculpting itself but rather the lack of polypainting/ptex. It is probably possible to leverage vertex colors for that, but it probably isn't as fast or smooth as what can be done in Mudbox or Zbrush.