Talk me into purchasing ZBrush

Hi, Ive been posting a few threads on here, trying out different sculpty-making tools. I have a long and experienced history with 2D digital art & design but not 3D. Nevertheless i have a keen eye and am good at geometry. ZBrush has caught my attention lately due to the praise I see on these forums, and from that, noticing it's name pop up more and more noticeably.

So, today, I downloaded the 30-day trial with the intent to dive pretty deep. For just the GUI is quite beautiful. Thats a big deal to me, for GUI design is my own profession therefore I am religious about it's role in making an application straightforward and intuitive.

One thing I don't like immediately, however, is that I am a Mac user (back to GUI), and would prefer to utilize my 2 quad-core xeon's than my 1 dual-core AMD PC. Nothing personal, it's strictly mathematical . But i would like to know if there are technical issues causing the release problems, which i am actually fine with, or is it that there could be less enthusiasm for mac suport (something i am not fine with). Oddly enough, it looks very much like a Mac Pro App which is why i've taken a bit of liking to it without even touching it yet.

I would like to know what areas of this application are important to the creation of sculpties. Such as: Do i need to start with certain types of objects? Are there plugins for SL that I can try with this demo? certain chapters/pages of the help docs I should focus extra time on? etc.

I'd really love any dislikes too. I am interested in creating both organic and geometric objects. I know in any other area of design there is no one app that handles it all. Im sure 3D is the same.

Thanks in advance,

Court

I evaluated zbrush a few weeks ago I have seen an awesome video about it and thought, thats looks pretty good and it seems to do exactly what i need. then after testing for a few hours i got into some trouble and asked for similar advice as you do ... and ended in using blender with quite some success.

The main point for me to not use zbrush was, that i was told that the learning curve of zbrush would be nearly the same as with blender and whatever you can do with zbrush would also be possible with blender...

So since i am also very new to 3D modelling, i decided to give it a try with blender and save the money. And i am absolutely happy with what i learned in the past few weeks from many blender ethusiasts all around the world and from my own experimentations on the theme

A key-point for my happyness are definitely the scripts of Domino Marama, which have been so helpfull. you can find them in this thread :

/8/60/203571/1.html

And i can't resist to mention, that we (the machinimatrix team) have meanwhile created 3 video tutorials about sculpted prims with blender ))
( look at http://blog.machinimatrix.org )

Well, this are just my 2 cents on this theme. Maybe that helps you a bit...

Blender when I tried it wasn't as difficult as is hyped to be, until i got to the exporting of ther map. That had so many steps, it made it impossible to do a design in iterations. Have there been any scripts or anything that speed that up in the recent months?

As i mentioned before, the scripts of Domino have solved all these initial problems. It is a matter of installing the scripts, then:

1.) add -> mesh -> sculpted mesh (you can choose between cylinder,torus,sphere,plane)
2.) sculpt your mesh to your needs. You even can use modifiers and subsurf in your modelling phase. So you can put the full power of blender into your work.
3.) render -> bake second life sculpties (create the map)
4.) Image -> save (store it on your disk ... now you are ready to import to SL)

There are 3 basic operations to get from scratch to a sculptie (create/render/store), so it is as easy as it can be to make sculpties with blender. (We covered that in our first video-tutorial) Hint: If you try it out, go to "object mode" before you actually render the sculpt map, then you see the map immediately popping up in the UV image editor)

And the best is yet to come: You even can reimport your sculpt map (any sculpt map) into blender, refine your model, rebake. So from a workflow perspective, you can't get it better. And recently we were even able to debug and fix one of the scripts (already incorporated in domino's dist), so that the workflow is truly lossless now (except that you will always have to live with the 8 bit per axis constraints).

In our secnd tutorial we have shown how to create textures for sculpties in blender.

In our third tutorial we have shown how to take care of LOD. We only cover the basics though. in our next tutorial we will cover high precision sculpties ...

But there are also tutorials available form Domino himself and many others. i constantly learn from them, how to make my working life easier

So all in all i believe blender in combination with the mentioned scripts is a very good alternative to try it out at least.

I only use ZBrush because there's nothing else that can do what I need.

I need lots of detail without having to work with bump maps, normal maps etc.

In ZBrush I can create a billion poly mesh and bake the details into a texture and apply that texture to a low res version of my model.

If anybody knows of a program that can do the same then - please! call me!.



Yours hopefully,

A reluctant ZBrush user.

Gaia: Thanks for reiterating about the scripts, I read too quickly and missed that the first time. I'm going to try Blender out again. Blender being one of the few 3D apps that doesn't crash on a leopard-equipped mac actually makes it easier to learn than most 3D apps

I have to admit, all these 3D apps seem equally confusing in their architecture and theory-- I'm assuming its just part of the game of crossing dimensions Im not sure why Blender gets the brunt of the criticism for being hard to learn. Perhaps because its free so it's a first for many? (guilty)


2k: How well do those texture images transfer after the conversion to jpg2000?

I am better at textures than I am at 3D (15 years professional & cumulative 2D, but 3D noobie)

With the drastic reduction of sculpt map detail at a distance, i'd like to focus quite a bit on the textures.

Money also isn't really an issue. I am aware that time spent using an app thats not up to preference is money spent anyways. However, i'm not rich, so ZBrush is at my budget limit until i can make something further out of this.

Thanks

As well as any other texture I guess. Seems okay to me..

If I were you I would just try the programs and find out for yourself which suits your needs best. They all have their weaknesses. But your needs may be such that certain weaknesses can be overlooked.

Also, your needs may change!. Believe me, I've divorced quite a few programs in my time.

There has been some discussion before about another application called 3d-Coat. It appears to be a cheaper version of Zbrush, and it's developing quickly. $120 price tag. It is almost being designed to particularly match the needs of Lightwave users, and you can paint in layers on a 3d model. It is more of a baking tool than a modeling tool, although there is some modeling stuff built in.

http://www.3dcoat.com/index.html

I can't speak to Blender or 3D coat, not having used those programs, but I am not sorry at all about the money I spent on Zbrush. As an aside, do shop a bit. You should be able to save $40 to $50 (after shipping is included) over the Pixologic site's list price. Pixologic is tempting, as one can download Zbrush instantly from them, but putting up with a looooong five working day wait was worth it for me.

Between the texturing and the sculpting brushes, Zbrush really does feel exactly like spinning a clay model around and sculpting/painting on it. It has the usual array of deformations and masking tools, but it is when you put your tablet pen in hand (set for pressure sensitivity) that the program leaps into life. I'll light brush over areas, fluidly shaping their curves, then bear down and gouge out depression, smooth them over as needed, etc. Thousands of strokes add up to organic figures that really look, well, organic

Texturing is the same way--I still finish in Photoshop, but the brush tools are very much on par with PS's brushes with control of opacity, alphas for different brush strokes, and a colour picker that is intuitive with instant "eyedropper" capture from your object or cavas. Being able to precisely put a highlight in a pupil to get the exact expression one wants, is blessed difficult without a painting tool like Zbrush. With Zbrush (or possible other 3D painting tools--again, no idea if 3D Coat can do that), it is literally a five second job (plus the obligatory five minutes of changing one's mind, but it might just be me)

For someone with your background, I suspect that you would find the brush tools instantly intuitive. And why not take advantage of that old fashioned learning transference?

Blender's interface is unintuitive at first. While some programs let you fire them up and mess around, you do need to commit to a little learning of the interface conventions with Blender. So the first few steps are harder in Blender than other apps. After those steps, then the payoff with Blender is a fast way of working where you spend more time looking at your model than the interface. And once you have learnt those conventions, finding things in the interface becomes a lot easier.

As far as sculpties in Blender are concerned, I do listen to the users of my scripts and try to make things as simple as possible while keeping them as flexible as possible. Many of the changes have been in response to people's problems. For example, understanding UV mapping was a big problem for people just getting started. So now there is Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh, which creates a wide variety of starter sculpties in any of the topologies, complete with UV map.

So if you do decide to try Blender again, remember it's a moving target that you can influence, and any feedback you have on the sculptie workflow is appreciated.