I’m not suggesting VSCode either. Plenty of companies have internal plugin architectures they don’t expose to third-party addon developers. Blender itself has a lot of undocumented customization points inside the python API for internal use.
Btw I’m glad I’m not alone in disliking monolithic apps built from cobbled together third-party packages. Can you imagine how much time and money Microsoft must put into curating VSCode’s package ecosystem?
I’ve been using ZBrush, 3D-Coat and Blender Sculpt Mode a lot for years, and I agree: Sculpt Mode is a pretty competent and feature-rich sculpting tool. Despite owning ZB and 3DC, I keep returning to Blender, also because you can easily switch to Edit Mode for poly subdivision modeling, and don’t need to go anywhere else for a great rendering using Cycles or Octane.
I’m confident that things will work out in time when it comes to the well-known subjects like Multires. Personally, I’m completely charmed by SDF modeling lately, that’s why I don’t spend much time in Blender anymore, but as soon as I need to sculpt more detailed models, Blender is one of my favorite tools, because of its versatility. For example, if you want to make a GI rendering of a ZBrush model, you need to either export to the expensive Keyshot, add an extra subscription to get RedShift into ZBrush, or export to Blender. 3D-Coat also doesn’t have a full-featured GI renderer like Cycles.
The holistic, all-in-one model of Blender is one of its strengths, in my opinion. There is no other sculpt tool that also includes two competent renderers, a best-in-class modeling interface, node tools, animation tools, etc. Pulling sculpt mode out of Blender wouldn’t make any sense. One might as well just start from scratch. Plus, there are already many good standalone sculpting tools.
I think most people in this thread, and the BF too, obviously care about sculpt mode IN Blender, and not just about building in general a sculpting software.
I dont like exporting meshes at all, changes will take ages compared to in house blender edits. Agreed with how nice and comfortable it is in blender.
It would not be separate from a user point of view, just in the code, kind of like cycles is.
I guess that’s why it’s called blender? It’s a blend of tools and dedicated workspaces, and many other third party things in one place!
I would agree, only for the performance issues. I’ve tried quite a few times to do tweaks here and there in Blender sculpt mode to heavy Zbrush projects and I always just end up bringing it all across in Zbrush with GoB because of the long wait times and slow performance going between the modes. Otherwise, I’d be more than happy to do these sorts of tweaks in Blender. I’m sure it works well for a lot of users, but for me personally I always hit a performance roadblock.
There’s no doubt that Blender is in a very unique position though as it’s the only one of the main 3D DCCs that has a sculpting toolset that is pretty much on par(more or less) with Zbrush.
In all honesty, I’m starting to feel that Zbrush is really starting to show its age - performance-wise. There’s nowhere else really for it to go with its limited old core.
At least in this sense Blender can continue to overcome the performance issues and take advantage of newer hardware, whereas Zbrush has nowhere to go.
Jeah, depends. Super high count and changing modes often is a no no…
Can be improved surely, and multires needs some updates but there were not many developers in the past years for sculpting…
Yeah, I’ve been keeping an eye on this thread over the years. There’s no doubt that Blender sculpt mode is a serious toolset. I’ve seen some fantastic characters done with it. It’s just a shame that it hasn’t got a dedicated team of devs(even 2 full-time) as it’s right on the cusp of going from good to great. It doesn’t even need that many new features, but rather a more artist-friendly UX, a reliable multires, and maybe a less painful experience performance-wise for when you do have to go into edit mode.
I always felt that there was too much of a disconnect with the mode switching for sculpting, but maybe there are addons these days to help with that? Or maybe I didn’t spend enough time to develop any sort of workflow, so lack of experience with sculpt mode on my end rather than a deficiency in Blender.
Pretty good news! 
The best news for sculpt in months, if not years.
Meanwhile, Hans just fixed the issue of the Dyntopo warning regarding attributes popping up when there are no attributes on the mesh. No fix yet for the undo bug though.
Fix #119177: False positive dyntopo attribute detection warning · cc0e015a35 - blender - Blender Projects
I almost gave up on this one. Fingers crossed (once again) 
My biggest gripe with MR is that it destroys every possible mesh data when used for rebuilding the subdivision levels. My next gripe is that extracting meshes from masks or visibility does not work with it 
Those are a pain for sure, but I’d tolerate most of that if it wasn’t for the spiking issue and the reapply thing. I’m getting it constantly and if it wasn’t for me being too lazy to switch from a linux to a windows box at work I’d be using zbrush all the time just because of that bug.
I hope he has time to take a look at the Sculpt Vertex Colors: Multires support too, fingers crossed.
I swear to God I’ll ditch ZBrush immediately if multires get fixed. Blender is just so close to zbrush now for what I’m doing.
If I understand this sentence correctly, wrap up of dyntopo changes ( not just preservation of attributes but handling of attributes creation by dyntopo brushes, dyntopo settings per brush instead of per mode and spacing/radius proper to dyntopo tesselation) will not be a priority and will take a lot of time.
I was hoping we would have incremental big improvements of sculpting workflow.
But it looks like, first, they will fix things to have a proper basis to redesign all sculpting and painting workflows, in parallel, at same time, probably during a long part of the year.
So, except performance improvements and bugfixes, there probably will only be small QoL workflow improvements like Polyline Gesture, during a long period.
If that means the base code will be ready for performance improvements and all the big, flashy features we’re expecting, then I’m all for it.
