Zbrush , Blender or?....

michaliszissiou

Some years ago, I made the same question Majid.
Blender costs nothing and I started learning it. At the same time, sculpting was really important to me, so I tried zbrush. After 2-3 weeks I decided to buy a license, I became a member of this highly artistic and competitive club.

The bad news: both apps have the worst UI ever made. From the greek mythology, between Skylla and Charybdis,
The good news: Blender on recent builds became almost competitive to zbrush or other sculpting apps. The development is impressive, more goodies are coming every day. Unfortunately it still lacks of good tutorials. Which reminds me that I have to write one on the excellent blender UV editor. There isn't any good one around.
ZBrush on the other hand is always the leader in 3d sculpting development, the new auto retopology tool is the best ever made! Pure magic!

@unknownuser said:

Zbrush seems that is focused on organic modeling and there are some questions at mapping ( I guess it is about triangles that may be created while modeling)... also it is capable of car modeling and some architectural.
my main aim is organic modeling and texturing.... so which app is preferred?

Probably blender is what fits in your needs. It is really a car modeler. There is a real and excellent UV editor, a texture painter (zbrush uses vertexpainting and it bakes them on UV maps), it also provides two modes of sculpting. A dynamically tessellated method "dynamic-topology) (like sculptris) and a multi resolution sculpting mode like zbrush. (zbrush also provides dynamesh and multi-res modes)

What else can I say… LOL, I use both apps.
Let's not forget, SketchUp became almost a plugin for blender these days. Tig's excellent obj exporter, And the new collada blender importer made it possible and easy.
Collada is great because it supports the n-gons of SketchUp.
For any modeling other than simple archi structures blender edit-mode is much superior to SUp.

Blender Cycles is a wonderful pure PathTracer and blender is a great platform for the most of the famous Render engines around. All these for free.

The learning curve will be hard though.

sculpting, dyntopo, retopology, multires sculpting, UV editor, possibly baking for alternative exports.
The edit mode! Modeling
The render mode, cycles, excellent node based UI.
Much more, like animating, particles system (hair, instancing etc )
And a powerful node based PostPro editor.
Blender is a vast application.

majid

Descriptive as always Michalis,....
seems both are awful at ui, BTW I personally prefer Blender's UI,... more engineering, and guess will understand tools while I'vnt been able to sculpt anything at Zbrush! several times installed and uninstalled it ,still annoying and strange to me!
ok seems the Blender is a better choice if both have similar abilities and capabilities..

arail1

You might want to try Modo. More expensive then Zbrush (and Blender, of course) but it's a full suite sub d modeler with a pretty good rendering engine. And a great community.

dedmin

@arail1 said:

You might want to try Modo. More expensive then Zbrush (and Blender, of course) but it's a full suite sub d modeler with a pretty good rendering engine. And a great community.

Modo - too bad it is soo unstable and crashware! Especially the Linux version - tried latest sp3 - the same! I tested latest Modo, Blender and Cinema 4D for speed and stability - Cinema wins hands down! It was faster with my 3 500 000 poly scene, and the new bevel tool is AWSOME! Here is a video showing whats new in R15 - http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/files/file/990-release-15-features/
Also Cinema 4D was the best at importing .obj from Rhino - keeping normals intact, where in Blender this is a huge problem - http://www.elysiun.com/forum/showthread.php?291711-Feature-Request-Implement-Import-CAD-generated-vertex-shading-normals-with-OBJ-files
And I can change the GUI font size in both Blender and Cinema 4D - but in Modo no way! So, after an hour working in Modo is headache and one needs a magnifier to see this tiny font on a big monitor! So sorry because I really like Modo!!

michaliszissiou

C4D!
Great application but also expensive.
Modo became expensive too.
Zbrush - pixologic never asked to pay for upgrades, not yet till 2001,
it is the leader in this 3d sculpting concept. The UI is a nightmare but after learning it you start thinking otherwise.
It is the only UI based on tablets-wacom like. This makes it a bit unique. LOL (OK it isn't a good UI I admit it)

I'm a little confused.
Are we talking about a sculpting painting application?
Or about a sub d modeler?
I'm not talking about rendering capabilities because modo, C4D and blender (cycles) are good on this matter.
All the three of them support external renderers plugins.

@unknownuser said:

Cinema wins hands down! It was faster with my 3 500 000 poly scene, and the new bevel tool is AWSOME! Here is a video showing whats new in R15

Indeed so. 3.5 M poly scene isn't much though, I usually have to handle 10-20 million faces. Blender handles it (on good GPU lot of RAM and VRAM) but C4D wins.

@unknownuser said:

Also Cinema 4D was the best at importing .obj from Rhino - keeping normals intact, where in Blender this is a huge problem - http://www.elysiun.com/forum/showthread … -OBJ-files

Right! We are working on this. And, on many other issues.
As our good friend Pilou use to say, blender is a black hole that eats everything.
BTW blender is a very stable application. In the hands of an experienced user.
It will crash if you ask for something beyond your RAM (sometimes it may not, just hangs there for 15 minutes, you can hear your HD - page file working like hell. You can still save your file though)
Keep in mind, fresh new betas coming every day. Full of new stuff and lot of plugins. Still it is stable. Not easy to find another app that stable.
BTW the recent Zbrush has become a little unstable and unpredictable under certain operations. They're working on this, I guess.

Not many have realized that blender became a competitive sculpting application (blender r2.69)
Competitive to zbrush I mean!
It sounds like fanboyism, but it isn't really.
Entering blender sculpting mode, we enter a different redraw on 3dviewport.
Under multi resolution sculpting, if you have a decent GPU and LOT of ram, you can sculpt smoothly on a 25 million faces, and even on a 100 million faces. It depends on the base mesh topology but this is common to all sculpting apps. I mean on a single object. Zb by example has a limit of 16 millions faces per mesh.
Blender also provides a similar to sculptris (better IMO) dynamically tessellated sculpting mode too. It is called dyn-topo (dynamic topology). The set of the brushes is simpler but IMO more effective than in zbrush.
After all, I'm a bit responsible for the fine tuning of some brushes. LOL (nice to be a close friend to the developer,)

Anyway all these are great applications. A matter of what you are asking for. I. personally use zbrush, 3dcoat, blender workflow. (and sketchup, sometimes), as an assist to blender)
If you're asking for a pro application with great tutorials go for C4D, for modo, or any similar. (I avoid mentioning Max because it is tooo expensive, tons of expensive plugins there)
If you're asking for Democracy, come to blender.

dedmin

@michaliszissiou said:

C4D!
Great application but also expensive.
Modo became expensive too.
Zbrush - pixologic never asked to pay for upgrades, not yet till 2001,
it is the leader in this 3d sculpting concept. The UI is a nightmare but after learning it you start thinking otherwise.
It is the only UI based on tablets-wacom like. This makes it a bit unique. LOL (OK it isn't a good UI I admit it)

I'm a little confused.
Are we talking about a sculpting painting application?
Or about a sub d modeler?
I'm not talking about rendering capabilities because modo, C4D and blender (cycles) are good on this matter.
All the three of them support external renderers plugins.

@unknownuser said:

Cinema wins hands down! It was faster with my 3 500 000 poly scene, and the new bevel tool is AWSOME! Here is a video showing whats new in R15

Indeed so. 3.5 M poly scene isn't much though, I usually have to handle 10-20 million faces. Blender handles it (on good GPU lot of RAM and VRAM) but C4D wins.

@unknownuser said:

Also Cinema 4D was the best at importing .obj from Rhino - keeping normals intact, where in Blender this is a huge problem - http://www.elysiun.com/forum/showthread … -OBJ-files

Right! We are working on this. And, on many other issues.
As our good friend Pilou use to say, blender is a black hole that eats everything.
BTW blender is a very stable application. In the hands of an experienced user.
It will crash if you ask for something beyond your RAM (sometimes it may not, just hangs there for 15 minutes, you can hear your HD - page file working like hell. You can still save your file though)
Keep in mind, fresh new betas coming every day. Full of new stuff and lot of plugins. Still it is stable. Not easy to find another app that stable.
BTW the recent Zbrush has become a little unstable and unpredictable under certain operations. They're working on this, I guess.

Not many have realized that blender became a competitive sculpting application (blender r2.69)
Competitive to zbrush I mean!
It sounds like fanboyism, but it isn't really.
Entering blender sculpting mode, we enter a different redraw on 3dviewport.
Under multi resolution sculpting, if you have a decent GPU and LOT of ram, you can sculpt smoothly on a 25 million faces, and even on a 100 million faces. It depends on the base mesh topology but this is common to all sculpting apps. I mean on a single object. Zb by example has a limit of 16 millions faces per mesh.
Blender also provides a similar to sculptris (better IMO) dynamically tessellated sculpting mode too. It is called dyn-topo (dynamic topology). The set of the brushes is simpler but IMO more effective than in zbrush.
After all, I'm a bit responsible for the fine tuning of some brushes. LOL (nice to be a close friend to the developer,)

Anyway all these are great applications. A matter of what you are asking for. I. personally use zbrush, 3dcoat, blender workflow. (and sketchup, sometimes), as an assist to blender)
If you're asking for a pro application with great tutorials go for C4D, for modo, or any similar. (I avoid mentioning Max because it is tooo expensive, tons of expensive plugins there)
If you're asking for Democracy, come to blender.

Actually, I prefer Blender and Linux combo, but my tests shows me that Cinema 4D Visualize is the best balance of speed, stability, price and possibilities for my current HARDWARE. Latest Blender 2.69 freezes my computer - I guess ATI drivers again, but Cinema 4D is fine.

rv1974

I don't think that the price (for evil imperialistic software) is an issue in Iran. From this point of view I'd try out the 'the cherry upon the cream'- Zbrush.
I'd give Autodesk's Mudbox chance too- its UI is waaay more 'normal'.

pilou

When you say "Organic" what sort of organic forms ?

If you whant tensile structures and voluptuous surfaces or smooth volumes try the Zen world of Nurbs!

And of course the crazzy one Moment of Inspiration!
Ultra speedy leraning curve and champion of ergonomy!
And also very cool for any mechanical volumes !

The trio
Sketchup(free) Blender(free) Moi(less 300$)
is the nirvana of the modeler!

Ps Moi has direct export SKP and the best export Nurbs to OBJ format!

majid

Thank you Pilo,
But I guess blender has compatibility with nurbs, am I right?

Ps: (just for fun)
I usually search images of a new word , maybe the easiest way to understand the meaning (as am not native English).in this case voluptuous was new to me and you can imagine that I was shocked when searched voluptuous!

pilou

Yes volulptuous can be these images that you have found but also something like that!
(very sinuous and curvated curves)
By Frank wih Moi

Ps About Blender and Nurbs I am not sure that it accepts the "3dm" format of Moi / Rhino!
And I believe that the Nurbs side of Blender is not yet very developped!

Box

Majid, you might want to dive into this thread about Blender than Solo started.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=54861

majid

very informative

pilou

@Majid
This is also voluptuous lines!
By samardac with Moi + Render C4D