I’m new to blender. After doing some research, I found that blender have almost every tools an 3D artist need, but:
ZBrush is currently one of the most powerful 3D sculpting software i think, but consider blender could do it too, is it necessary to buy ZBrush? How do you compare these two software’s sculpting ability?
Sorry for my poor English and noob question.
Depends on your sculpting skills and your production needs.
Depends how familiar you are with sculpting.
You could always learn sculpting in Blender and then move to ZBrush if you feel that Blender is lacking.
Positive of buying ZBrush is that you will have a few years head start to get familiar with it, negative would be that it can be a waste of money if you lose interest.
Blender is a generalist software that is supposed to handle production of animated movies, game assets, 3d prints, and through addons anything developers of its community are capable to imagine.
Zbrush is a specialized software to produce concept arts, textures and sculptures (digital or physical).
It is dominant in its field : 3D modeling.
So, if your goal is to touch to any aspect of 3D (not just modeling but also rendering, animation…), you will not achieve that just with Zbrush.
You will have to learn Blender or another generalist software or other software specialized in other fields.
If your goal is just to become a sculptor, you could evolve more rapidly by skipping Blender and directly learn Zbrush.
You can also use both. They can complement each other.
If you don’t know what you want, yet ; you can give a try to Blender.
It is free. It will not cost you more than the period of the try.
I’ve been working with both Blender and ZBrush for several years now.
Generally speaking, ZBrush still wins from Blender’s Sculpt Mode when it comes to high-detail sculpting with lots of polygons, and it offers a great export pipeline for displacement maps, normal maps etc. to editors like Substance Painter, and to game engines.
However, ZBrush is relatively limited in areas other than sculpting and vertex painting. For realistic rendering you’ll need to export a scene to Keyshot, Blender or a different renderer. For good old-fashioned polygon modeling, ZModeler is quirky in my humble opinion. For example, you can’t extrude edges. You also can’t work with multiple simultaneous camera views, as you can in Blender.
Blender has the advantage of offering a very complete toolset. You can alternate between powerful polygon modeling, sculpting and rendering, all in the same coherent environment, with interchangeable keyboard shortcuts. And Blender’s Sculpt Mode is rapidly catching up with a lot of tools that were previously only available in ZBrush, and new tools are added that even ZBrush doesn’t have, such as the Pose brush, Elastic Deform brush and the Cloth brush.
Some features are more or less on par with each other, such as Blender’s Dyntopo mode vs. ZBrush Sculptris Pro mode, and Blender’s Voxel Remesh vs. ZBrush Dynamesh (although the Dynamesh algorithm still works a bit better).
A former ZBrush-only star, the ZRemesher auto-retopologizer, is now available as a Blender add-on called Quad Remesher.
Blender (version 2.8+) also comes with a more conventional, accessible UI than ZBrush. The Zbrush UI is a bit idiosyncratic, with lots of Control + Shift key combinations, and many tiny buttons in endless rollouts. But you can customize / personalize the ZBrush UI a lot better than Blender, I have to admit that.
Blender has solid curve tools (Bézier and NURBS). In ZBrush you’ve got some very quirky curve tools you need to awkwardly manipulate with the brush gizmo.
Some ZBrush features I still really miss in Blender are the volume-preserving Alt-Smooth brush, the Deformation ➔ Polish tool, and the Slice, Clip and Trim brushes.
In conclusion, these days buying ZBrush is only necessary if you’re into really high-detail sculpting.