I think all of this is going to be highly dependant on personal opinions and preferences.
Personally, I would never recommend ZBrush to a beginner sculptor because of how complicated its bizarre interface and way of doing things makes the process, whereas I’ve always found sculpting in blender to be highly intuitive, even when I was know nothing beginner. Day one of using blender I built a full character, with limited tutorials. I’m not claiming it was any good (it was awful ) but it was complete. Day one of ZBrush I was having to look up tutorials on how to zoom in, getting frustrated with the whole “tool” system, wondering why my object/viewport was rotated at a weird angle and why I couldn’t fix it, and only finding tutorials that said, “once you learn the interface working in ZBrush is very fast and intuitive.” Which, while probably not wrong for most people, was less than helpful. What took me one day in Blender took me three in ZBrush to get to the same level, and that was after I had experience sculpting. If I’d had to start out in ZBrush I doubt I would still include sculpting in my workflow. And once I got used to ZBrush to the point where all its little quirks and weirdness were things I did without thinking about it much, I never achieved the speed I got without too much effort in Blender. (My claim to fame from school was sculpting a human torso fast enough to impress a professional character creator while using Blender). And I only regularly use five, maybe six brushes, in either software, with two doing the majority of the work.
AND
The people who disagree with everything I just said and think ZBrush is the easiest software to learn with the best, most intuitive tools, and who use all the brushes aren’t wrong. Different people have different mindsets and needs.
What I mean is that in zbrush you can get its advantages by day one. Here’s how: learn how to save, how to get rid of the spotlight, how to enter edit and start sculpting. Learn 5 brushes, learn how to remesh. Done.
All of this can be done in 1 day. From now on you can exercise.
Blender is more complicated. I think a beginner will make better quality sculpts out of zbrush, and will think zbrush is “higher quality”.
A pro, like the guy in the video, can use blender a d be OK with it. A beginner needs zbrush. I use it because objectively speaking I’m not great.
Just open and click Sculpting Workspace ! Ohh nooo it just moves one of the eight vertices… hmm might be bit lowpoly… how can i… ohh wait what is this Help → Tutorial and then…
Yes, I understood what you meant. I disagreed with you, perhaps more strongly than I needed to, explained why (from personal experience) I disagree with you (I could do all these things in blender, or the blender equivalent, minus the spotlight within a couple hours, while in the same time period of ZBrush I was still trying to figure out the very very before you even start a sculpt basics), and then acknowledged that you and the people who share your mindset on ZBrush aren’t wrong, just different from me and the people who found Blender the far easier software to learn and get better results from.
Again, I disagree from a place of personal experience. But you certainly don’t need my permission to have an opinion, and I’m not really trying to change your mind. It affects me not at all what software you choose to use, and I know I get annoyed when people pressure me to use Maya, or ZBrush, or any of the other “high quality” software instead of the one I’m good at.
A beginner may prefer ZBrush, they may find it easier to learn. It may even be the absolute best software for them, and more power to them. But again, I taught myself Blender. I was making full characters (Sculpt, Retopo, Rig, and Texture) before I even knew ZBrush existed. And since I didn’t start out as an expert, and still wouldn’t consider myself one, to say that a beginner NEEDS ZBrush just isn’t true.
Once again, to be very clear, I’m not telling you, or anyone else, to use Blender if you prefer ZBrush. I don’t want anyone to feel pressured to use software that makes them miserable and doesn’t do what they need easily if there’s another option available.
Bro. Blnder brushes dont even work out of the box if you dont tweak them.
The damstandard in zbrush will work out of the box. Clay tubes in zbrush “just works”, in blender the equivalent has an annoying smooth that changes if you zoom in andout. You HAVE TO tweak the brushes in blender. Its not that you grab it, go play with it.
A beginner in blender will ask himself “why the heck the brush has stronger smooth if I am closer to the mesh”… will take a while to figure out how to not screw up what hes sculpting.
Go in zbrush, you know very little abou it: Boom everything works like magic, there are few controls to learn, but it works so easy. The stuff to learn can be learned incrementally. There are by default a ton of brushes most of which you will never use.
Thats why zbrush is the default beginner choice. You do see lately more people also advising blender, due to the evident improvements done to sculpting, great stuff. But blender is inherently more complicated, I would even say “objectively” since blender is not just a tool that is for sculpting. you will need also basic proficiency with blender and overall to know how to model and how to use some modifiers.
Trust me on this one: Beginners will achieve very good results with zbrush. In blender they will be worse, they will think its blender fault. That said, I think zbrush is amazing and will never be replaced. but, if you wat to be honest you can do everything also in blender, it just takes MORE skill, not less.
Zbrush is the leading 3D sculpting application in the world; I find it dubious that somehow they aren’t doing many things well.
Some of this “better than blender, worse than blender” sort of sounds like comparing … oh, I don’t know… Blender to Resolve. Yeah, you can edit and composite in Blender - and Resolve confuses a lot of people - especially those who have no interest in reading a manual. But let’s not just unilaterally decide that Blender is the better video editor.
Seems like I remember watching Bay Raitt do a modeling demo at SIG years ago, using Nendo (or maybe it was Mirai…) Anyone here using Nendo?
Unless you’re referring to strength and radius settings, I have tweaked exactly ONE brush in blender in the entire time I’ve been using it, and I ended up reverting it because the original settings did turn out to be better.
I’ve never experienced this.
I still disagree.
This also applies to Blender, and in fact MOST things that people learn.
Yes, but I don’t use modifiers to sculpt, unless I’m using multires, and that took literally under a minute on google to know how to use.
Trust ME on this, that is not true across the board. I say this as the person people came to when they needed help with ANY 3d software. I’ve seen a lot of bad beginner sculpts from ZBrush.
Not always. The college I attended actually started people out on Maya for character creation,
Not always true, and I can’t speak for anyone but me, but I’ve never blamed the software when I suck at something.
Now, I don’t think there’s anything left to say on this. You disagree with me, I disagree with you, and it doesn’t look like there’s much common ground, so I’m going to agree to disagree.
beginner sculpts are amazing in zbrush, people already do complex shapes with few instructions. While on blender that isnt the case. before you git gud at it its going to take a while. I think its quite objective given how many people get into sculpting from zbrush. Why? Because thats easier.
I took some tutorialcourses for zbrush, in few lessons I was already using it on a regular. One day Iearn just how to remesh and few other commands, and from that day onwards I use it constantly. Now I use zbrush with the xtractor brush, all the time, and mind it Im not even aware of all its functionalities. Its impressive how easy zbrush is, everything works out of the box. Want a normalmap? You can have it, just set the UVsize and jump to the lowest level of subdivision, boom you have your normals. Its a piece of cake to do. In blender I still didnt figure out how to bake normals “correctly” so I resorted to an addon called “simple bake”, after a week of failures doing experiments with cycles baking.
I recognize that in blender the way to create base shapes, collection of other geometries is much much faster thn in zbrush, for xample I use geometry nodes alot, all stuff not remotely available in zbrush, but geometry nodes alone takes some expertise in blender, not something you really tell about to beginners when theyre still struggling to figure out things on their own.
Zbrush: ALl ready for the beginner, they also have an even more beginner software on their website. Thats simply it. Im not sayin gblender is bad, Im in a blender fanatics forum and I use blender on a regular. Just saying that its more complicated and beginners will blame it, they will say “muh blender is complicated therefore its bad”. But the mega pro in the video I posted uses it just fine, just because hes a pro and he would do just fine also with a webapp for sculpting.
One important thing to consider is that Zbrush (and sculpting-oriented workflow in general) is beginner TRAP. New users may think that they are being productive, but it is impossible to learn fundamentals of CGI (topology, UVs, rigging, shading, optimization) if they stick to Zbrush. While in Blender, they’ll have to learn all the tools of the trade sooner or later. I’ve worked with Zbrush for several years, and got rude awakening when I tried to expand beyond it. Zbrush sculpts are pretty much useless as-is if you bring them to another program; they cannot be rigged properly, will cause memory outages, etc.
Plus the CGI community is already full of amateur Zbrush sculptors, so pretty much the only way to make any real use of your Zbrush skills is to become top 1% sculptor and get hired by some Hollywood studio. I think becoming a competent generalist (which Blender encourages) opens more professional opportunities. Game dev, freelance, selling models on marketplaces, or even making animations yourself
I saw older school sculptors solving issues I have now with blender, with some plugins, they were doing everything into zbrush ages ago.
Zbrush can also create the diffuse map and normals.
I saw anime models makers using only zbrush, and making stuff very good.
Surely if you also want roughness and other maps I don’t think the zbrush is enough. But, yes it’s a pretty complete package.
You can also create morph targets in zbrush, do little mini animations with them. But, obviously you can’t animate full characters.
Turns out zbrush is also an excellent software to do what is called “hard surface”, especially since they got the zremesher that ensures you will never deal with weird cad export poles of vertices. I personally use the zremesher all the time just to Quick remeah the cad models, they get turned out into usable all quads topology, but they lose the UVs.
So I really don’t see giant limitations of zbrush, it’s the beginner friendly tool that gets stuff done and has some peculiarities that you have to be introduced to. For example, for me it was complicated to get the concept of “how do I save a scene?”.
Blender is a generalist app while Zbrush is a dedicated one.
So, of course, for a sculptor, use of Blender implies to learn basics, that are not directly related to sculpting.
You have to get familiar with Object mode and Mesh Edit mode basics.
Blender Sculpting workflow refactor during 2.8, series and following additions have been done, without updating some defaults and polishing UI/UX to make it fluent.
Some brushes are not handling well all changes made.
It is true that according ratio between height and radius, Layer brush may not respond well.
Like, in any area and any software, there are bugs in Blender Sculpt mode.
One target for Blender 4.0 is to revamp default keymap for sculpting.
But several improvements to sculpting workflow have been postponed to 4.1.
So, AndromaxPro has a valid point. Blender could be better, out of the box, for sculpting.
And it should when Blender 4.1 will be released.
Until OP will say that “character creation” or “character art” refers exclusively to sculpting, Blender is still better option overall. Provided that we compare both programs on their individual merit. With Blender you can get a character from a concept all the way to game engine export (or animated movie), without relying to any additional software if you want. Zbrush is nowhere close to that.
And personally, I think that using 3d art only for making static shots of the model is a waste of potential. If you want to make illustrations, learning to draw and paint will be a better option. So someone making nice looking stuff entirely in Zbrush isn’t that impressive for me. Again, hoping to stay a sculptor without understanding technical details is a pipe dream for anyone but the top talent. Since everything is interconnected in CGI. If you rely on auto retopology, you’ll often need 2 or 3 times more polycount to achieve the same detail you’d make by poly modeling manually, and UV layouts likely suffer as well, meaning worse use of texture space. If you do not understand how the rigged model deforms, your model shapes will clip to eachother if someone will try to rig it. So starting in Zbrush will create lots of bad habits you’ll have to unlearn later
That’s same. Sometimes I see impressive talents out there, ultra sculptors, very good, but I’m sad they don’t also animate. It’s as if they lost the opportunity…
Example: rushzilla on Twitter got some serious skills, his anime models are all gorgeous. But he’s not using the potential.
Ucupumar makes also impressive works, amazing guy, he also has a super good addon for painting in blender. Too bad none of his stuff can be animated.
So what’s the point I wonder? I look at an image? Yes wow but with AI you can make dozens of those images.
These two you mentioned are at least trying to rig their models and make *.gif’s. That’s better position than most CG sculptors. (And fuck those who post AI generated images BTW. I do not care about anything they produce)
You should check in with Michelangelo sometime on why he choose to sculpt and not animate. Or maybe the billions of people familiar with his sculptures could offer some thoughts here
To be honest it is me who was being a bit dismissive of CG sculptors first. In the context that maybe focusing on sculpting exclusively is not a best idea for a new 3d modeler, from a practical standpoint. Not denying their skills or effort
Fun fact: Michelangelo allegedly regretted signing the Pieta. He felt it was vain.
That’s neither here nor there or animation vs pure sculpting, but I think it’s interesting.
And…
Animating in marble… Now I kind of want somebody to do it. I guess it would be like that animation that was done all in oil paintings, but harder.
I like Michelangelo’s sculpture, it’s amazing, the attention to detail is above and beyond, especially considering he didn’t have an undo button, but I prefer the work of the Baroque period. I just feel like the statues there had more personality.
Ucupumar in particular grants that hes using only blender to texture, and I find it interesting. I asked him how he does it… is he using special compositor effects? is he using shader magic? not at all, hes just that good, using nothing but a layer addon that he created… and he achieves much superior results compared to what I can do with the help of many cheats and other softwares like substance painter.
rushzilla too uses only blender. I imagined he was using zbrush, instead I saw his videos and its all blender from start to finish.
I mean if those 2 are able to do that good anime characters with blender I think you can safely say “yes blender is Ok for sculpting”. But zbrush is much more beginner friendly, for people who are just starting out and dont know where to look and just want to scrap some models and do something with it.
) but it was complete. Day one of ZBrush I was having to look up tutorials on how to zoom in, getting frustrated with the whole “tool” system, wondering why my object/viewport was rotated at a weird angle and why I couldn’t fix it, and only finding tutorials that said, “once you learn the interface working in ZBrush is very fast and intuitive.” Which, while probably not wrong for most people, was less than helpful. What took me one day in Blender took me three in ZBrush to get to the same level, and that was after I had experience sculpting. If I’d had to start out in ZBrush I doubt I would still include sculpting in my workflow. And once I got used to ZBrush to the point where all its little quirks and weirdness were things I did without thinking about it much, I never achieved the speed I got without too much effort in Blender. (My claim to fame from school was sculpting a human torso fast enough to impress a professional character creator while using Blender). And I only regularly use five, maybe six brushes, in either software, with two doing the majority of the work.
