There was blender build from 2013 that could handle 200mil poly. It was slow as f, but around 100mil totaly usable. And i had terrible pc at that time. I wonder what happend to that version of blender.
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Ah thats why the viewport navigation in ZBrush feels clunky and sometimes laggy? Or is it just me?
Viewport navigation in Blender feels way more fluid and snappy.
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Yeah, I remember reading an interview ages ago where the interviewer asked why ZBrush doesn’t make use of 3d acceleration in the viewport, and the answer (I don’t think it was Ofer Alon but someone else working on the code) was essentially that doing it in software allowed them to do alot of ‘tricks’ which were all centered around doing as little updating as possible when the user interacted with the mesh.
Perhaps Vulkan being lower level compared to OpenGL and DirectX, could bring this type of flexibility to hardware accelerated 3d in the future.
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No sadly its not like that. Another lowlevel API is not able to solve that problem by itself or make the problem in principle significantly better. The fundamental difference is that Zbrush managed to break the computational complexity by doing the operations in a lower dimension at a faster pace with obviously neglectable drawbacks . They are enrichening pixels with further information to calculate the sculpt deformations in a manner thats quasi-3d but in the logical housing of a 2D imagebased system. They call it 2.5D to express that its definitely more complex than a pure pixelbased operation (pixols) and beside that there are other optimizations they do to limit the amount of data that has to be hold and processed. There is also a synced 3d based datastructures, its needed eg for object rotation and thats where you can get a feel for these high polycounts they are shifting. But overall they can take an advantage of these different modes to get a tasks complexity down, what makes specific parts in zbrush much faster.
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Zbrush versions from 2008 outperform Blender by a hundred miles on my 2014 laptop.
Is there any other 3D software that is more similar to Blender in the way it works, and that actually performs ‘much better’ than Blender in sculpt mode?
If this exists, that should be our goal to achieve and overcome. Comparisons with zBrush when it uses a completely different highly specialized working method for sculpting seems pointless to me. I think maybe it would be better to make it clear that Blender will probably never be able to achieve the level of performance that zBrush has. So instead of creating false expectations, tell the user that if you are looking for what zBrush performs, you should use zBrush.
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That’s what I did before adding my brief explanation of how ZBrush probably works.
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I would mostly love some Multires performance boosts.Try to smooth a mask with multires and lets say 2 million faces. That feels rather clunky and slow.
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Every editor in Blender seems to be almost its own program. If someone wanted to and had the skill, they could try to come up with something pixol like and add it to blender as an alternative or replacement sculpt mode. I haven’t been around Blender long but it seems like sculpt mode is the result of maybe 5 to 10 people working almost solo in big short bursts with long lulls between activity. This is not how you get a result comparable to zbrush or mudbox. But there seems to be a massive number of people highly pissed that they have to wait more than a few weeks to get a “FREE zbrush killer”.
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Multires sculpting performance is quite decent on my side (3.0 alpha). 32 million faces example.
Clay strips works kinda funky though.
But masks and especial when you smooth them (via mask pie menu) is suuuuper slow and the lack of sculpt vertex paint with multires is very sad. 
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I’ve been wondering if final animations actually use those 64 million triangle models just to get the skin pores? Wouldn’t it be much faster and easier and as-real-looking to just make a bump map 90% of the time? Maybe for super high fidelity 3d printing you’d want physical pores on the mesh but how many people really do that and need that?
So if it’s about using developers resource to completely rewrite one of the modes just to achieve the performance of the ‘best’ sculpting softwatre out there. Why should sculpt mode be the only mode to benefit from such an expense of developer resources?
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Well i would bake a normal map and use less multi res subdivisions if i go for an animation.
To sculpt those details gives lots of creative control.
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We don’t need the performance of ZBrush but we need more performance here and there.
What we really need are some basic tools and functions.
Super simple and probably very easy and quick to implement feature like Lasso Hide. I bet thats a 1h or less job for a dev.
Just to name an incredible basic tool.
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Sure, it is what I wrote in my message. Better performance is always welcome, but within the possibilities that the Blender method uses. For this reason to compare how bad performance Blender sculpt mode has, you have to compare it with other programs similar to Blender and not with zBrush
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Mudbox/3DCoat…
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(Just so that what I had expressed is not out of context)
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Yeah…
It would be nice if they could do some kind of dev sprint (as they call it) just to tackle the basic stuff of sculpt mode…
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When comparing between “similar” DCC’s (Maya, Max, C4D, Modo, etc) Blender is the one with the best sculpting tools/system. At best they just include some sculpting tools and that’s it, so there’s no point in making such comparisons.
Now, the way I see it, the reason Blender is constantly being compared to Zbrush is because it’s already pretty good and it makes people feel like they can achieve the same things (tools, performance and polycounts mainly) as the big Z. I personally wouldn’t like to have a carbon copy of ZBrush, but I understand why it happens, right now there’s Zbrush, Mudbox and 3DCoat for sculpting (not taking into account apps for mobile devices or VR here), so the only real alternative is Blender. Is only logical that people is going to be comparing it to the big ones because there’s nothing else.
I agree though that the devs should be clear with the users about what to expect from the sculpting module, that would help to avoid these kind of conversations that come up every few days 
If it was up to me, I’d push for better performance overall (not just for sculpting) and cleaning up nasty bugs and quirks, right now multires can handle a decent amount of polygons but lags only with some tools, that’s kinda weird… And after that I’d work on a solid multires system that works well with animated models, that supports shapekeys (or sculpt layers if want to call them that) and good, fast vertex paint.
Some people tend do dismiss the ability to have a rigged model with a multires modifier on top, but that’s a huge advantage over other programs. With a Blender centered pipeline you basically don’t need displacement or normal maps for details, since everything could be stored nicely on the multires modifier. Now imagine what we could do if shapekeys could be used (and animated) with multires 
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