Mudbox or Zbrush?

Anth · Sep 2015

So I have been using Mudbox for a little while now but I'm constantly hearing about ZBrush and it seems to be the most popular one.

I was just curious what advantages it has over Mudbox and how are the two different ?

loggie24 · Sep 2015

Zbrush is popular for a reason, it has much better functionality, features and so on which can be useful for an artist but it's also much harder to learn. While Mudbox is much simpler and easier to use in my opinion. You can get great results with both but in the end Zbrush wins for me.

oglu · Sep 2015

for sclupting go with zbrush.

Anth · Sep 2015

How is zbrush for painting ?

Zack Maxwell · Sep 2015

Anth wrote: »

How is zbrush for painting ?

Horrible. Because of the way shading works in ZBrush, the texture will look 100% different once you export it.
It's only good for in-ZBrush renders.

ysalex · Sep 2015

Zbrush is easily the winner for sculpting, but it does lack painting tools that mudbox has. I don't think zbrush is particularly hard to learn but the ui takes a couple days of getting used too.

And grimwolf, use the skinshade4 matcap with anisotropic turned down by 2/3rds, it's a pretty accurate representation of color for what you'll get in other programs.

Dataday · Sep 2015

Zbrush is hard to beat when it comes to sculpting.

For the best all around package though, sculpting, painting, UVs...ect I'd have to nod my head towards 3D Coat.
http://3d-coat.com/

RaptorCWS · Sep 2015

In my opinion Zbrush was not that Hard to learn. You just have to accept that it is different than maya/max/mudbox/etc. spend a week learning it and you will get the hang of it quickly.

Joao Sapiro · Sep 2015

short answer from someone who uses both :

Mudbox its super fast to get started, you import a basemesh , or use a pre existing one and you are ready to sculpt intuitevely.

Zbrush , it requires alot more fiddling around to do some basic operations that you can do on other programs , ( like selecting elements , the hide/unhide toggles, the subtool system instead of beeing one model where you can treat it as one instead of "tools" ) , then you have to customize the ui to be to your liking wich is really nicely implemented on Zbrush.
And...the most important is that the sculpting is way more responsive than mudbox altho it always gives a flatshaded look wich is kinda shitty as the final model wouldnt be flatshaded in production and sometimes can make some details look bigger than what they are.

That was not a short answer , bleh sorry.

JedTheKrampus · Sep 2015

+1 for Zbrush. There's just nothing quite like it out there, and the painting is actually pretty good, despite what Grimwolf might think. In particular the clay brushes give a pretty unique feel when you paint RGB colors with them. Combine it with the robust masking system and you can produce high-quality work pretty fast. You'll need lots of points to get a good polypaint bake, though, and you might have to figure out how to work with HD geometry and Zbrush's baking if you're working on particularly high-resolution stuff.

That said, Mudbox is a great value and has the most sensible UI of any 3D program out there IMO. It's quite powerful, but you can't spend 90% of your time in it like you can in Zbrush if all you do is model/UV/texture.

pior · Sep 2015

Also bear in mind that almost anyone giving advice for one or against the other is probably a user of one of these two apps, not both.

Personally I'd recommend trying them both, and maybe even getting a license of both. Zbrush has astounding mesh generation tools (dynamesh, and so on) but Mudbox, in my opinion, offers cleanest surface handling which is why I personally almost always finish my models in it. But what is relevant to a particular workflow (or even, a specific art style) doesn't necessarily apply to another.

MM · Sep 2015

i use both and recommend having both. i started with zbrush, then switched to mudbox and now i use both.

agree with Pior about Mudbox. regarding cleanliness, i am a clean freak and mudbox gives me a crystal clear picture of what my model actually looks like in an accurate perspective unlike zbrush.

i personally do majority of my sculpting in mudbox and might add some surface detailing/ minor sculpting or non-sculpting tasks involving highpoly inside zbrush.

zbrush is ahead of mudbox in too many ways than anyone here has time to explain to you. lot of those feature might be completely irrelevant to one user or the other but that doesnt take away any points from zbrush.

just be careful of one thing, your sculpt might look "sick", "cool" etc. inside zbrush with its fancy matcap shaders but they might actually be shitty in terms of surface quality and detail quality. so it is just a warning to not be fooled by your perception inside zbrush.

claydough · Sep 2015

I would probably be the minority here...
But with future iterations, if they can get the same performance in Maya without any bloat headaches I might find myself going to zbrush a lot less if I could just brush and paint ( and dev my own pipelines around as much ) in Maya.

( talking bout the new mudbox sculpt tech being introduced in Maya 2016 )

claydough · Sep 2015

Must be my own perception ( as I don't recall anyone ever agreeing with similar experience )
But somehow brushing in Mudbox feels like manipulating a thin eggshell surface whereas Zbrush feels like building upon a solid surface.
( more clay like )

pior · Sep 2015

Claydough : this is all due to brush settings. Most of the Mudbox ones need tweaking (especially regarding spacing) and are also dependant on model scale - whereas Zbrush comes with a lot more presets and the scaling is normalized to the model as far as I understand it.

Anthony · Sep 2015

While it's been a few years since i've used Mudbox, i have dabbled in Z a little, and while it can be very daunting (thankfully, there's lots of tuts out there, both free and paid for), it does have some pretty good mesh creation features Mudbox lacks, like dynamesh, Shadowbox, zspheres and zsketch.

The Transpose tools can be a bit of a headache, and, besides the texturing system which could use some work (no layers), there is no real "scale" in zbrush, like there is in every other 3d app out there, so unless you move your models back and forth between z and another app using Goz, your models are liable to come into your secondary app in nearly microscopic scale, requiring major resizing (this has happened to me recently)

ysalex · Sep 2015

Anthony, it's true that zbrush scale system is pretty annoying, but for the record, the scale keeps just fine. Zbrush uses the top sub tool as the scale, so if you import something as your top subtool and never swap it out with anything, you'll retain scale just fine.

Anth · Sep 2015

I feel like eventually I will swap to zbrush eventually, because I know it will be good practise to learn both.

Tripl3M · Sep 2015

Zbrush ! ... it has many useful tools and zbrushcentral is a plus

Blond · Sep 2015

The biggest flaw and wek point of mudbox in terms of sculpting is that there's no equivalent to dynamesh in it. Correct me if I'm wrong, last time I touched it was the 2015 version...

I really enjoy the simplicity and straightforwardness of the UI, I never felt loss and was pretty quick to grab but the problem is that when I sculpt, I like to have the flexibility to add finer details whenever I want to without having to subdivide the whole damn thing..

Even Blender has dynamesh equivalent and it's not even a sclupting-focused software...-_-

Anyway, Mudbox as we know it will probably die since Autodesk will fuse it inside of Maya...

Anth · Sep 2015

I really hope they do fuse Maya and mudbox together, makes life much easier and makes Maya a very powerful programme.

littleclaude · Sep 2015

Do your sclupting with Zbrush, Texture in Mudbox or Mari.

Hopefully one day Zbursh will sort out there texturing, it really needs a layering system and they need to sort out that crazy flip texture legacy issue.

Mudbox or Zbrush?

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