Blender + Zbrush?

I know Blender has its own internal sculpting engine, but from what I’ve seen, Zbrush can dwarf it any day of the week! Getting files across wont be a real hassle, and I have a graphics tablet, so I figured I could use it for sculpting. From what I hear, sculpting is a much more effective way of modeling “organic” meshes and even hard surface ones sometimes, depending on complexity.

Is it worth picking up?
Is sculpting hard?

I figure the Blender sculptor could still be used for making shape keys, adding in some minor detail, and for any needed model touch up or re-proportioning.

Ideas?

Absolutely worth it. The sculpting, decimation, and retopo tools are far beyond what Blender has. Blender has a few nice things (I prefer the way dyntopo works compared to Zbrush’s dynamesh, for example) but the brush and mesh adjustment tools are so much more advanced in Zbrush that becomes meaningless.

The good news is, using the two in tandem is really easy. The GoB tool provides a Blender addon and Zbrush plugin that will enable Blender support in Zbrush’s GoZ roundtrip thingy. You can easily pass models back and forth with that, in case you want to hand-edit the base mesh in Blender, then bounce back into ZB, etc.

Zbrush’s multi-map exporter tool also works fairly well for packing up the finished low-poly to send back to Blender for rigging/animating/rendering/whatever. Or your can just use the GoB output, it’s just personal preference.

If you’ve never even work with Blender’s sculpt tools though, work with that for awhile. No need to drop $800 on Zbrush if you’ve never sculpted before. Get the basics down, and once you start hitting limitations of Blender (polygon count, no good tool for a tricky task, etc) look into getting ZB.

EDIT: forgot GoB link: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/GoB_ZBrush_import_export

The UI and workflow is completly counter intuitave for me as a blender user, the only thing that makes sense to me is the actual act of sculpting with a brush. And even though trying to understand the UI makes me want to pull my hair out, I can’t imagine using anything else, it’s power is enormous.

Sculpting doesn’t take long to pick up, total amateurs can make something detailed and decent in a short amount of time, but it takes ages to master (so much so that I don’t think anyone can ever say they’ve mastered the craft) What’s great is that practicing is fun, there’s more of a focus on the “art” than parameters.

GoB makes using ZBrush with Blender really simple. It’s probably my most used Blender add-on, actually. But for quick sculpting, or mesh reshaping, there’s no need to hop back and forth. Blender’s tools are certainly more than adequate.

Zbrush is fantastic. It’s unbelievable how smooth and fast it all works which is the main reason I prefer it over Blender.

One thing both Blender and Zbrush have in common is the initial few hours of wanting to kill yourself when trying to use the damn interface, only to find out that each is brilliant respectively.

For pure sculpting blender is just fine.
However, lot of interesting tools in zbrush.
And, a new zbrush is coming soon.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?190182-A-Sneak-Peek-at-the-ZBrush-to-KeyShot-Bridge
I’m not talking about Keyshot, though the bridge looks impressive.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Other Software”

Sorry about this post, it’s totally in the wrong thread, I have two windows open and posed in the wrong one. For some reason I can’t remove the image and cant delete the post so…

You can get some pretty amazing sculpting results when using Blender. However, I will have to admit that Zbrush truly does hold it weight, and I say why a lot of big studios use it but for me I will have to stick to Blender sculpting abilities I do not have the money to afford Zbrush right now =p