Can’t compare a built-in sculpting system of a regular 3D app to a dedicated sculpting software like ZBrush… still, for a built-in system, the sculpting toolset in c4d is actually very powerful…
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I saw this thread shortly after it first went up on Tuesday and held off commenting simply because on top of a lot of other worrying news I got that day it just knocked me out for six. But I keep coming back here. It feels a bit like obseessive compulsively scratching at a recent wound. This news felt so sudden and out of nowhere especially since 2022 had just been released to so much buzz and positivity. They always come out with ideas and developments that are simply brilliant and jaw dropping like the recent addition of the base relief tool.
All creative apps have user communitys that evolve and grow around them but Pixologic and ZBrush has such an exceptionally strong user community and culture built up around it. It is the only other creative CGI community out there I think that is in any way comparable to the Blender one. Although in Blender’s case of course this goes a bit further as Blender actually is the community. But in many ways so is ZBrush.
The community is something that has been nurtured and cultivated over so many years and was also a big part of the identity and appeal for many. It is genuinely inspirational and fun very supportive and full of lively warm enthusiastic people. It brings together individual freelancers, small buisness owners, bedroom hobbyists. As well as people working at the highest levels of the creative industry’s in film VFX and animation, design and manufacture and in the fine art sculpture world. All using exactly the same tool. All talking together and shareing working practices and tips and tricks. This acquisition has the pontential to cause much deeper of an impact to a far wider and more diverse user base and working social culture than any we have seen yet.
ZBrush is just so unique and has such a massively wide reach across so many different and diverse areas and industry’s that it’s a whole culture and ecosystem all unto itself. How will being simply another software asset in a bigger company portfolio effect all of that. Of course the worst case would be that it is simply mined for it’s tech. Right now I find it hard to contemplate or think about. Hopefully it will continue on with the same team and management . Of course the incredibly close relationship they have always had with the user base inevitably would likely begin to erode in a larger more corporate parent environment. It is hard not to be feelling deeply apprehensive right now based on so many similar situations we have all seen unfold in the last few years.
To most I think who have an experience of traditional art and sculpture. ZBrush is the one that feels like working with real materials. To become a good ZBrush user you simply need to learn to be a traditional sculptor. This is why I have always so much loved ZBrush.
Take care everyone
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Well-written, @Toka! I totally second that.
I’ve also thought about that. I don’t know if the acquisition includes access to the ZBrush core tech / source code, but in that case, Maxon has got a hell of a gem in their hands, as no-one has ever managed to replicate the brilliant engine that enables ZBrush to effortlessly handle a hundred million polygons.
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I think maybe the open source solution to this conundrum of specialist programs getting bought up by bigger companies and then possibly becoming worse off as a result, is Blender branches like for example the sculpt branch, if it was developed enough and had enough resources could a Blender branch turn into something similar to a specialist program like Z-Brush for sculpting?
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Whenever i hear about that i think well thats great they have an efficient engine, but at what point do you stop needing more polygons? And wouldnt new hardware bring other programs upto that level by brute force? how much would a next gen say 4090 GPU and a Zen 4 CPU be able to handle?
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If Maxon actually improved the user experience that would be one thing. All they do is change the icons making it harder to find stuff you knew. Everything else in Cinema 4D was changeable to whatever the user liked for over a decade. Maxon would fire anyone who actually made Cinema better.
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Speaking from my personal experience, the bliss of not having to think about how complex your mesh has become gives you the pleasant freedom of never having to compromise. You can add details to a skin at the pore detail level without having to resort to UV unwrapping and fiddling with textures.
Sure, hardware has gotten way, way faster than in the early days of ZBrush. If you’ve got a powerful up-to-date system, Blender can also handle tens of millions of polygons without a significant speed decrease.
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Arc-vis guys perhaps.
I used C4D for ten years.
Before dumping it for blender 2.8x and beyond
I am a character animator with some VFX.
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Hey thank you. I’ve had a couple of days to think things over while reading everyone else. All such crazy times right now. So much feels inside out and upside down.
You were mentioning 3D Coat quite a bit further up the thread too.
I recently just upgraded to 3D Coat 2021. The painting and texturing room is the only part I have tried out properly yet but it is fantastically fluid and fast now and very intuitive. I tried out some previous projects involving some UV unwrapped but very large and dense meshes so I think I gave it a pretty good initial stress test. It appears to be dramatically smoother and faster than it was before. The retopo tools have been significantly updated too and look amazing but I have not tried them out yet
Hey, 
I in no way want to knock Blender sculpting or Blender itself which I also obviously dearly love and feel very protective of. But I’ve got ZBrush spinning and editing multiple subtool layers of massive sets of scan mesh data on a 15 inch mid range laptop right now on a kitchen table. Most of the time the fan isn’t even audible. I hear it mainly if I need to do a dense processing task like detail re-projection. There is considerable work life quality advantage to not always having to sit down at a desk with a big purring beast of a workstation machine when doing work like this. Also there are the remote working advantages too. But there is so much more to Zbrush than simply the ability to spin and manipulate mind boggling amounts of polygons.
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Interesting. And i think you are right its probably more important to have great efficiency in the code like Z-brush has rather than having brute force hardware as the solution, but i would also suggest all the money people pay for subscriptions to software could be budgeted directly to buying better hardware if they moved to Blender. That means an even more powerful laptop. And think long term, 5 years of paying no subscriptions, take all that money and buy even better hardware in 2027.
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I don’t think Blender performance on a new hardware in 2027 will ever match to Zbrush in 2022 on a laptop.
1.2 mil seems great to use Instant Meshes with or bring into Blender for retopology. 3Dcoats Voxels were a bit slow until the recent update which made them way faster. If Modeler brushes run faster with a lot of voxels I see no downside.
I’m pretty sure ZBrush was running something similar to what UE5 Nanite uses. It reduces the polys to what can be seen. This is why UE is saying you don’t have to reduce your sculpts. It’s because it’s using similar tech. Zbrush was way ahead of their time though. Hopefully Blender will be next to adopt Nanite.
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I bet its not using that kind of tech and i would also guess that such game engine tech as nanite would not be compatible with live sculpting or topology editing or modeling.
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Nanite is basically just a very fancy LOD system. Zbrush is the way it is because it’s not a full 3D program. It’s also why it’s limited in certain features and they have to build externally called plugins to do certain tasks. While you might think the operation is running in Zbrush it’s actually exporting your subtool to an external plugin program and reimporting it when it’s complete.
But it’s unbeatable for performance. When I first used ZB I think I had a single core PC with 1.5 gigs of ram and you could work on impossible polycounts for that time on a home PC, and this was when it was still a 32bit program. 
The gap has obviously closed now because of the advances in hardware, but back then it was mind boggling stuff.
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? Edit mode runs fine now. I am editing a 500.000k faces (900k triangles) sci fi model in edit mode, and it runs utterly smooth (granted, it consists of many separate pieces, but I am editing them all simultaneously in edit mode).
A 1 million faces landscape object still works quite fine now in R3…
Anyway, editing a 100k mesh is a completely smooth experience now.
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Weird? Not for me at all in 3.0. I have a weapon model made up for several parts, each around 100-200K and doing anything in edit mode crawls at a few frames a second.
I have to say though, enter/exit edit mode and switching between components is pretty good, and navigation is fine, it’s just manipulating the geo that lags.
I just tried sculpting on an 8.6 million face 17 million triangle mesh and it was absolutely smooth sculpting no problem at all. However trying to do something in edit mode is very laggy. But i can rotate around the mesh and display it just fine looks like 60fps.
My spec is a 1st gen ryzen 8 core and a GTX 1070.
Update.
interesting i tried remeshing it to 40 million faces(78 million triangle) in sculpt mode, firstly it used about 27GB of RAM and took a while so theres one area i would upgrade in a new system 128 GB of DDR5 would be nice, and now when i sculpt its a bit laggy i estimate 10- 20fps with a slight lag but its workable, and note whilst im sculpting my GPU is at 100%, so if thats the bottle neck then great, because i figure a really nice quadro or an RTX3090 could be in the region of 5 - 10 X faster.
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Do you have modifiers on top? Otherwise theres something really not working as expected.
No mate, just straight geo.
Well I dont know if has been finished with blender 3 release, others here may have followed more closely, but there were attempts to boost the performance of edit mode. And yes edit mode is definitely slower than sculpt or object mode. At some point with increasing mesh resolution fps start to drop noticeable. But if I remind your system specs right it should definitely not happen anywhere between 100 - 200k triangles for you. If you have another system at hand make a crosscheck.