Im hoping to use blender for bigger and more detailed sculpting but im not sure if im able to achieve that.
I want to use blender because its free and has the sculpting tools i need. I know zbrush has more options for sculpting but i would prefer blender because of the pricing.
I know most 3d digital artist use highend desktops but im currently looking at a surface pro9 32gb with i7cpu. for tablet use and 2d work. But i want to also know if they are good enough specs for creating characters and creatures in blender?
Alot of work i find for sculpting in blender is quite stylised and i cant really find anything realistic or find the type of work you see from zbrush artworks.
the type of sculptures i had in mind to try and create were statues like sideshow collectables and prime 1 studios. I like the more organic sculpting then hard surface sculpting.
For example like this. Is this possible with the specific specs for the surface pro9 and is blender capable of reaching these types of sculpts with the fact that its alot of detail, polygons and other things that go into creating something like this?
Welcome to BA It is absolutely possible to make something like this in Blender. It is not possible with the specs you listed. You need at least 64 GB of RAM for 10 million+ polygon sculpting. 32 GB will not get you far at all.
The statue you’ve posted is possible, as mentioned, but for high-end Sideshow works, not a chance.
I work as a collectibles sculptor in Zbrush and even on my i9 12800K and 3090ti with 128 gigs of Ram Blender fails miserable on more complex projects. If you’re serious about this, invest in Zbrush, unless you want to do simpler, more stylised projects like the example you posted above.
@Musashidan Wow so blender really isnt capable of getting that type of stuff like zbrush. But just to be clear you said that the picture above is cable of being made with the the surface pro and its specs?
Because i’ve always loved the tablet experience as its an all in one device for me.
Honestly im not too sure on zbrush, it cost money, and im worried about maxons future. But it is the better option.
I’ve actually been looking at a msi titan 128gb 12th gen i9 12900hx 3080ti laptop as an another option, How good might that be for zbrush?
Not the sort of high-end, high detailing you see on Sideshow pieces. Just to be clear, don’t pay any attention to the clickbait videos you see on Youtube about Blender being a ‘Zbrush Killer’ or even on par, for sculpt work. It doesn’t come anywhere close in terms of workflow/features/performance, and I say that as a Blender user who loves the program.
The example you show above could be done in Blender on a Surface Pro, I suppose. It’s quite a simple piece in terms of components and details. I’ve never used a Surface Pro so I don’t know what sort of performance they output in a 3D program like Blender.
It really depends on your goals/intentions. Zbrush is out in a field of its own for high detail work. There is no other program that has rivaled it in 25 years, and that won’t change any time soon, or maybe not in my lifetime. If you are passionate about this and are going to invest serious time and work into it then you don’t want to limit yourself. Blender is more than capable for certain types of projects, but lacking for higher end stuff. You need a very beefy machine and you might be sorely disappointed with a surface Pro performance.
Zbrush was designed to work on low-end machines and you can still run it comfortably on a 10 or more year old machine. I would always advise any 3D artist to get the highest spec machine they can afford, but personally I think you are only going to hamper yourself with a weak machine like a Surface Pro.
@Musashidan you are right about the surface pro it’s definitely not intended for high end work, im not sure even how zbrush would go on such a device.
Im not a professional, more of a hobbyist. but i want to learn and get better to do more high end stuff. By high end i just mean like having multiple characters in the same scenery, details like skin texture, detailed clothing and objects. I may not even get that far, but its having those options available incase i do.
I also draw inspiration from michelangelo the renaissance sculptor and how he designs his work. thats the type of sculptures i’d like to do too.
But yes, i am planning on getting a high end laptop rather than a desktop for portability reasons. i’d use a graphics tablet with it too for drawing.
If you can, do you have any artworks done solely in blender that i could see, just to get an idea?
I also have an artist that inspired me to try and work in blender rather then zbrush. his post on this forum too which is where i discovered with.
I fully believe what your saying and i thank you for the advice but could you look at this artist. a few of his works are done completely in blender and they are exactly what i want to achieve.
speaking bluntly, these things are not compatible. Laptops are not capable of the kind of high intensity work you’re talking about.
You should also consider that a laptop and a drawing tablet may be portable, but it’s not really usable- your lap is not big enough to hold both, you need a desk or a table. You can’t have a graphics tablet big enough for detailed sculpting with a laptop, anyway.
Your options are: just laptop. Highly portable. Not at all usable for sculpting or multi character scenes. Laptop and drawing tablet. Kind of portable. Still not usable for high detail sculpting or multi character scenes. Or, desktop. Not portable. Can do what you want. Which is more important to you, portability or accomplishing what you want to accomplish?
Whatever laptop you get will have to be plugged in all the time while you work. I also have a high-end laptop, but it’s not really portable or suitable for portable work, for reasons @joseph mentioned. As well as the tablet you will also need something like pureref on screen. Ideally you want to work on a multi-large monitor setup or a 4K monitor. High end laptops are also very heavy/bulky and have large power supplies.
The only works I have done in Blender are hard surface game assets. all my collectibles work is done in Zbrush.
Yes, I’ve seen his work, but to achieve the He-Man character or Hulk characters, for example, he has to bake his details down to normal maps to continue sculpting, at a certain stage, because of performance issues. This is a real hack and I imagine it would be a pain. It seems to work for him, though, and he’s coming from Zbrush so he’s obviously happy with using Blender for his work.
You should contact him and ask him about his workflow/machine specs. My best advice is to get a future-proof machine with good specs and try Blender first before committing to Zbrush. If you can do what you want in Blender then happy days. I don’t know your skill level/anatomy/3D knowledge/etc, but if you’re just starting out it’s going to take a few years to get to that level anyway. I just think that the laptop isn’t much use unless you’re travelling all the time and won’t be consistently working in one place.
Whatever sculpting/anatomy skills/knowledge you gain in Blender will transfer over, and vice-versa, so it’s not the end of the world if you choose one or the other at first. If you’re doing this as a hobby then the pressure is off and you can take your time developing a workflow toolset that works for you.
I really don’t want to give you the impression that you’re wasting your time with Blender, because it’s a wonderful program and a capable sculpting environment. However, I think it’s important to warn you that if you do go with Blender and aim for Sideshow type work, be prepared for workarounds/hacks/frustration with the performance issues, and often clunky workflows in comparison to Zbrush.
Wow thanks so much for the advice. You are right, desktop is the safer option, and at home theres not a big reason to move around everywhere. So a stationary desktop isnt bad at all.
But i do worry traveling to university. its quite along way and would require staying on campus for the time being. And its unsure if ill head home on weekends or just stay there completely.
And its not just staying at a dorm its going to class too. do you have an idea of what might be best for that sort of solution. its all good if you dont i might specifically ask the blender community that.
Im willing to spend abit but im not buying two computers, im only gonna stick to one and a drawing tablet to go with it. But that means laptop and laptops are more expensive than desktops and less specs.
You’re welcome. Well, that is a tricky one, if you’re going to be at a university and unsure of your living arrangements into the future.
Do you have an ipad/modern tablet? The other option is to use a program like Nomad on the tablet, in the meantime, purely to practice and get used to sculpting/studying anatomy - a huge amount of your learning should be devoted to studying anatomy. This way you can get a headstart without committing to either a laptop/PC or Blender/Zbrush, with the benefit being that everything you learn in Nomad will transfer to Zbrush or Blender. Just until you sort out your permanent arrangements.
It’s absolutely a useful tool for big complicated sculpts. I am currently creating some meshes to be the basis of molds to create real world objects. These are routinely 100M polys.
Though there are times where using zbrush’s boolean functions is faster for joining parts, I often run into a poly limit and have to just do it with Blender and wait a for it to finish.
All in all though, Blender’s interface is just friendlier. Nobody would have said that 10 years ago!
But one thing I was not fully understanding. Do you mean you were sometimes running into poly limits in ZBrush boolean function or Blender sculpt, and or boolean.
I was trying out several Blender sculpt performance experiments when I could and posted some of them here in the recent past. I was choosing to use a mid range lap top and was very impressed by a lot of what I found. Both by the sculpting feel and level of detail that it could handle now as well as the overall stabllity and consistancy.
One thing I was trying out was replicating a re mesh by union functionality in Blender to combine high resolution models into a watertight meshs for 3D print etc, using a combination of boolean and triangluate. It was working really well on my test subjects.
Of course it’s always going to be a sensible move to run a decimation process on the finalized parts to be combined if possible. I would try to do this decimation process first whatever software I was using.
The last tests I was doing was trying to find the best and easiest way to extract a cavity map. I wish we could just have a bake from multi res function for this as with Normal and displacement. Then you have essentially everything you need for sculpt based textureing at the push of a button. Having vertex paint work with multi res would be a huge step forward as well I think.
The limitation as far as poly count in boolean operations that I was running into was with Zbrush. from what I could find on forums, the reason for this is that Zbrush is a 32 bit application. This limits it’s memory use to 4GB of whatever You have installed. This actually made me more impressed that Zbrush does what it does with a 4GB limit.
In cases where the poly count was too high for Zbrush (98 million last I tried) I used Blender to run the boolean operation. While successful in creating a water tight mesh from multiple sculpted meshes, Blender takes a long time to do it. It will hang for up to fifteen minutes while joining the meshes. That is why I still see if Zbrush can do it first any time I need to join meshes via booleans.
I agree that decimating before and after a boolean operation is always best to do. Unfortunately, Zbrush does a better job of this. Blender can give very good results, but takes so long to do it. I find myself decimating a mesh multiple time to find the right balance between poly count and appearance. I do not want to wait for each round of decimation when I want to do it over and over like that.
Again, the stuff I sculpt is for real world, large physical creation, so I may need to push the poly count much further than one would for a desk top size sculpture.
I have been working with a lot of very dense scan data lately. Mostly on historical sculpture subjects. Anyway yesterday I needed to do a very quick architectural roof scan. Just a raw decimated but textured scan mesh. Nothing too refined or worked over. Just something to fly a camera over.
Anyway for some reason the mesh kept exploding when I tried to use Decimation Master on it in ZBrush. I tried multiple times with different settings and checked consistancy and that it was welded and and all seemed fine. So I tried with the Blender decimation modifier and it worked great first time and kept all the UV’s.
Decimation Master is a thing of beauty though and I am not knocking it. I don’t normally have any problems with it normally and it is always my first go to and it creates amazing results. This just seems to have been one of those funny occasions. I’ll go back when I have time and try to see why the mesh was exploding. I have my go to settings in Decimation Master. Perhaps it is possible to have something like that with Blender decimation modifier too.
I’d be interested to hear more details about the sorts of meshes you’re working with. My issues mentioned above are for mostly 1:6 or 1:12 scale printed collectibles that are up to 250-300 million before decimation and may consist of 100s of individual parts in the raw mesh form.
For me, and the tests I’ve done, it’s been all but impossible to work on these projects in Blender. Zbrush breezes through the data, but Blender performance is really terrible and unusable, for my needs. Everything slows to a crawl.
So, I’m wondering, are you mostly working on just a few dense mesh parts or many? Are you continuously moving between sculpt/object/edit mode while modeling and sculpting, or are you just using Blender to process raw data?
It is absolutely possible to make something like this in Blender. It is not possible with the specs you listed. You need at least 64 GB of RAM for 10 million+ polygon sculpting. 32 GB will not get you far at all.