after dealing with some juicy zbrush rage. the absolutely absurd scaling bug in R3. it just drives home even harder the fact that. for all ' high end ' intents and purposes we only have two sculpting apps to work with. two. in the whole fucking world. two

i could near write a book on where zb and mudbox suck balls but it's not really my intent here to bash either of those. more to question : why are there no other competitors in this field ? given that pretty much all detailed character and creature work ( and more and more environment stuff ) is gonna go through a sculpting phase how do we end up with effectively only two solutions to ' choose ' from ?

3D Coat?

Silo 2 has some sculpting features, albeit underdeveloped If you can still remember hexagon, that had some sculpting tools too.

yeah there's definitely other apps that support sculpting. i'm pretty much just refering to those high end gotta work up 4 million plus quads kinda deals

also there is a trangle based sculpting tool with context sensetive subdivision , i think its called sculpris

Modo and Blender has sculpting. Prefer Zbrush and Mudbox myself, though.

yeah modo,blender,3dcoat,sculptris etc have sculpting but its all emulating what zb and mudbox already do. I think tacit is right surely there should be someone out there claiming to do it better not just do it almost the same. For me 3Dcoats voxel sculpting comes closest to being a truly innovative experience out of the competition apps.

It's not really that many ways to do it. And what's wrong with them anyway?
I mean, look at any major 3D package, it's all basically the same shit. Just how it is.
Even modeling in Silo vs Modo vs Maya, isn't THAT different.

At least come with some suggestions as to what should be improved, or how a sculpting app could be made different and better than what's available now.

Its probably Zbrush's popularity and its extreme ability to push around so many polygons.

Everyone expects all the other softwares to be on par with it(you cant go back from that), to compete with it they have to emulate it in some ways. I mean with 3DCoat which is a totally different approach to sculpting they get tons of people asking why wont it do what Zbrush does.

Zbrush has defined the path that all others must follow. Maybe into the future when pcs have become a bit more powerfull, Zbrush's polgyon power wil become an irrelevance.

Originally Posted by Clockwork

And what's wrong with them anyway?

At least come with some suggestions as to what should be improved, or how a sculpting app could be made different and better than what's available now.

well. i didn't really wanna go down that road since it will inevitably see me baggin' them* ( * to be clear i'm really only referencing mudbox and zbrush )

my somewhat fundamental issue with these is that they err at stubbornly maintaining their respective ends of the spectrum

zbrush : tools / function focused. and to shit hell with how they relate to one another and whatever preconceptions / expectations you might have of the windows platform. or ui interaction in general

mudbox : standards focused. works so hard to be nothing but familiar. barely begins to explore unique tools and functionalities
.

where the one suffers from poor design decisions. the other suffers from not making many decisions at all

a conversation exploring what i'd like to see in a freeform digital sculpting ( for lack of a better term ) environment would take a while. and i'm happy to go there of course. but i'd have to do it in chunks

get a chunk of clay and you are golden.

Curvy3d/ has a different approach. The "Curvy Map" is a displacement map you can paint onto the mesh. The new version evidently has volumetric sculpting tools as well. I just downloaded the demo earlier today so I don't really know much about it or how it compares to the others.

hmm dunno the scale issue in 3.5 isn't really much of an issue once you checked how it works, never import into a polysphere, always import into a sphere3d or any other parametric3d object, save the export values, if you have scale issues, check those values

it's a bit of an aside to the topic but, Neox, you'd prefer that method, or just simply importing your mesh as you would in any other situation ? *



* and other iterations of zbrush. 'cept 3.0. which had the scale bug too