I’m taking an online course of Blender this semester, and it seems like something I could easily get the hang of. I have many years of experience in Adobe suite, learned rhino years ago (but haven’t touched it since) and just started dabbling in zBrush before the start of this semester.
I was told by my professors that I draw like a sculptor, so I decided to delve into zBrush. After getting the jist of it, I had to cut my time with it short to learn Blender. So I ask, how do they compare? Are they at all similar in how they are used? Can I work on a file in both programs, getting the shape roughed out in Blender then going into detail with zBrush? Or would that just be a waste of time and I should just stick to one?
Again, I’m new to this whole scene of 3D Modelling, so my questions might be inane, but I’m gonna learn the hell outta these programs this semester. Thanks for any input you guys have.
Yes, you most certainly can have a workflow which uses the strength of both applications. I find that Blender is better suited to roughing in models, getting basic forms down, as well as creating the base mesh(es).
Blender also has some excellent (Industry leading in some cases) UV unwrapping tools which will allow you to do the UV unwrapping on your base mesh before you export it to Zbrush, which I would recommend for high-to-ultra detailed sculpting and for texturing.
Once you’ve finished your sculpting in Zbrush you can bake out your texture maps, normal maps, cavity maps and other such things and bring a lower polygon model back into blender.
At that stage you could retopologize the mesh and bake all the textures to a map if you wanted, or just stick with the current base mesh and textures and then move onto other things like rigging, lighting or what have you.
EDIT: I should also mention that if you’re taking things back and forth from Blender to Zbrush the .obj format is the format you’ll want to go with.