Speculating about Zbrush
admin
Oh gawd I want this application so much, haven't made too many normal maps before and only in max, mostly rely on substituting with good diffuse and bump maps from Photoshop. Would you guys say that if you can paint in Photoshop you would find Zbrush as easy?
Replies
Im no zbrush pro but I would say - no theres definitely a learning curve. It will eventually be just as easy but it will probably take a while to get used to the way 3D sculpting works and learning how to get the results you desire, not to mention the interface and the importing and exporting and retopologising process. I guess its a bit like photoshop cause no matter how much experience people have in ps painting theres always new ways of doing things and custom brushes and workflows to try out.
Quoted for being so god damn true. The interface for zbrush is horrific at best. the way you save your work is convoluted and not what you would expect.
You press ctrl-s?
Less tongue in cheek: Take a look at the Subtool Master script they released, it skips over the doc/tool and automates going to the top level to avoid on save crashes.
GCMP: They both MB and ZB have trials, try them. Neither is much like Photoshop, but if you're familiar with sculpting in clay it's similar to that, but easier.
I've never crashed on save though so I don't really use it for that. But the mirror and merge tools in STM make it a must have addition to the toolset. I prefer zbrush myself, simply for all the tools it has that mudbox doesn't. The UI is annoying at times but not that big of a deal if you are doing a lot of sculpting.
Alex
Yeah, if you can actually see yourself sculpting every day, or atleast a few times a week zbrush is a good option. If not, you will likely have to re-learn it every type you open up the app.
Ah. Everything before 3.1 was painful in my opinion -- useable, but technical and not 'fun' (except 3.0 which was probably unuseably buggy). MB brought a clean UI that got rid of the feeling that the program was blocking what you were working on. With 3.1 ZB can be equally clean and there are a few tools with no MB twin.
Which does make me hope that Autodesk gets MB2 together sometime soon. It would be interesting to see them take some of those ideas and see them developed with a traditional / minimalist UI.
Interface=Bad, written by aliens!
But, who cares man. If the price of making great art is learning something different, wouldn't you do it? I resisited zbrush kicking and screaming. Everyone said Mudbox was the answer. Well, for me, so not true. Zbrush is far more powerfull. Mudbox is great though. You can pick it up, learn and use it in 45 min. But it is super limited. Zbrush has conbination power. Like, you can paint one brush, with any stroke and any alpha in any combination of the 3. Mudbox is limited this way. Additionally Zbrush pushes polys different and has no slow down when painting on billions of polys. Even on 2gig's of memory, it still allows you to paint faster than mudbox would at only 4 mill.
Especially the flatten brush is great, in Zbrush it never gives me the result I expect/maybe I should play with the settings/. But that`s it really for me at least.
Zbrush can handle millions of polys on my crappy computer /subtools!/ + it has so many nice features especially after v3.1 came out.
It has a weird workflow and some really annoying things but once you get used to it you forget about them /ok that`s a lie :poly004:/.
Zbrushcentral is huge and I always find the answers to my problems just by using the search button or the online help.
You can get some nice scripts and plugins for free both from Pixologic and other users /for example incremental quick save, old smooth brush/. You can drag buttons anywhere you like than hide it with tab if you dont need them. I could go on. Zbrush does make mo go :poly105: sometimes but I still prefer it over Mudbox. Anyway, sculpting is sculpting only the tools are different so doesnt really matter which one you learn first.
Yeah the UI... I was like what the hell!! Where is the file dropdown? Very strange layout :poly111: