I am sorry Michalis, I have to say I don’t agree you on this. ZModeler is a total failure and a very discouraging development from pixologic.
I think any one who has understanding of vectors and 3 dimensional space will agree on this.
It is very hard to use. Not to mention there is no real control of transformation of vertices/edges/faces
If you want to move a vertex on an axis that axis is defined by a orange indicator on your brush cursor.
For some expected reasons these orange indicators snap to an increment and you find your self constantly trying to
eyeball the correct direction.
Correction About Transpose: There is a transpose option inside the pop-up menu I missed it, my bad.
[SUB]
“There is also the issue of inconsistency. There is already a tool for moving called Transpose tool.
Yet you cannot use it for transforming vertices/edges/faces… why because Transpose tool works on the object level, and
vertices/edges/faces are a member of an object. Thus we use the ZModeler brush with bad control scheme…”[/SUB]
Every essential modelling command is stuffed inside a right click pop-up. There is no tool menu or icon for a mesh function.
You want to make a cut you need to move to an edge and press right for a pop-Up , find your mesh function and then apply.
But wait some options pop up another sub-menu which is called “Modifiers” which has “some” control over parameters for
“some” mesh functions. And for some reasons if you slip outside this Pop-up menu… oops… start over.
Those people who hate Blender’s F6 attributes/ parameter menu are gonna love this… except there is no panel to fall back
to like you can do in Blender…
Its not helpful. Those who know their way around modelling will find this “tool” hindering, because lets be honest its unpractical.
Those who don’t know anything about modelling and don’t care at the moment (For example Digital sculpting specialists) will think
this is useful and get use to its weirdness and hindering methods, but they will have a hard time adjusting to a standard way of doing things in 3d.
So long story short , if you think you are never going to model something in another 3d suite, and don’t think of using a free 3d suite like blender. Fine you pass the requirements have fun with ZModeler.
Else ; use Blender (or your 3d application) and use a GOZ plugin…simple. Even without a GOZ plugin I would rather hassle with export/import than use ZModeler.
Lets be frank about ZModeler; its not intuitive, its not user-friendly,its very different than standard modelling ,its lacks control or any form of precision…
I think any one who has understanding of vectors and 3 dimensional space will agree on this.
I agree (lol), honestly I do.
Lets be frank about ZModeler; its not intuitive, its not user-friendly,its very different than standard modelling ,its lacks control or any form of precision…
it is user friendly! But, I agree, no precision. (but who cares, ha ha )
These ideas, to copy the zb UI or something, I do not agree by all means.
What’s happening here?
This is how we will give up?
There are SO many things I despise about zbrush’s workflow and UI (mainly centered around I/O). However, when actually sculpting, it feels great and it becomes obviously apparent why it’s still king of the hill.
That being said, sculpting in blender using dynamic topology gives a similar feel of power, fun and freedom. It just falls down when you need to start adding fine detail.
This has been my sentiment from watching the videos. If you’re really methodical and like more control in a structured workflow, you won’t really like ZModeler, it seems to cumbersome in its attempts to emulate precision and order. But that’s just me though.
lol arguing about Zbrush UI is a silly thing, I think it’s fantastic because I’ve worked with it for about 2 years. If yah don’t like it, you don’t like it and nothing really can change ones mind about that sort of opinion to be honest (everyone has their preferences when it comes to workflows). It’s kind of a mute point.
Needless to say I’m looking forward to the new Modelling tools in Zbrush. I can’t wait to play with them, hopefully I like them and won’t need to leave Zbrush that often anymore. Blender is still my favourite modeller, it beats the hell out of Maya for sure and can compete with 3dsMax as well. But I’ve never really cared for the sculpting feature, it’s too bulky and cumbersome for me. Needless to say I still expect to use Blender and Zbrush in my workflow. Probably for Blender UV tools and Animation mostly if I really like the new modelling tools in Zbrush.
Blender devs updated it for you.
Disable symmetry in sculptris. Let’s see how dense the mesh can be.
It’s a trick. However, I don’t like this kind of tricks.
ZBrush. I’m always considering it as the top of the sculpting apps.
I was expecting some more. Nothing for pure sculpting though.
I don’t see any real time dynamic topology, the more important for pure sculpting.
Displacements and occasional remeshing only.
The behavior of brushes against a real time topology and a displace-remesh approach is completely different.
The first one needs a simple set of real life-like brushes.
The second needs a complicated, extended set of brushes. Aiming the vast majority of "professionals’ (they wish to be), a bounce of irrelevant people to any deeper meaning of art. (Now, I’m almost trolling I guess, apologies)
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
I just need a simple and spontaneous tool for digital sculpting. So far, blender (dyntopo) is the closest.
It’s not ‘real time’, if you snake hook something out it will eventually get blocky and you’ll need to retopo. Unlike sculptris which just lets you go at it.
Michails: I don’t know, blender is my favorite modeling app but I can’t seem to get a feel for its sculpting tools.
I don’t quite understand why real time retopology matters so much. You need more polygons? Just make a little pen swipe off of the model and you get it. It’s like adding more clay to the model when you need to add more clay. Need to lower the amount of polygons? Adjust the bar slider and swipe the pen. Honestly it’s not that hard. Sure it does it evenly across the whole mesh but you don’t use dynamesh as a final mesh anyway. And I prefer the control over having the program just keep adding more and more polygons automatically. Sculptris can get out of hand with that sort of stuff.
Zremesh works really well for actually having a model be used in 3D (outside of zbrush that is - like blender) to be honest, in r6 I used it a lot for organic models rather than just retopologising by hand and it worked really well. Hardly any need for adjustments (other than for faces, I still find doing faces by hand worked far better).
Dynamesh (ZB) : Needs to evaluate the whole mesh when the user tells it to. So a lot of sculpting can go on between updates without you realizing you should update the mesh. However if your model has grown significantly in volume this means the previous parts with more polygons need to be reduced in polygon size to compensate for the new added mesh volume. Then you adjust the slider to a bigger amount of tessellation. At this point you have unused tessellated faces on the parts of the model and DM unnecessarily goes over already finished parts of the mesh. ( Example : I work on the eyelids and nose add detail and when I move on to ears Im out of tessellation, increase slider you may lose details on eyes and nose.)
Dynatopo (Blender) : Evaluates the vertices under the brush an adds/collapses tessellation accordingly. Unless you stroke an area it is untouched, so you can create a lot of detail to a face and add ears and shoulders and torso and legs and arms and tail and horns and you still won’t need to touch tessellation slider. If you do touch the slider no detail will be lost on your finished parts of the sculpt, since it only evaluates under the brush…
Yeah dynamesh vs dyntopo.
However, the behavior of the brushes was my point.
A brush displaces vs a brush adds topology.
An example: the Bl clay strips vs Zb clay buildup
Under dyntopo is a real carving brush, under zb it rather “decorates” (displaces) the surface
On the other hand, the clay brush. It can’t work as expected under dyntopo. One of the zb brushes we miss in blender.
Just testing and learning the ZB r7
Working on multires after some auto retopology.
We are able to freeze subdivisions, add topology (Zmodeler), alter topology, add or delete loops etc. un freeze subdivisions and… excellent, it works. Don’t try it in blender (multires) + edit mode, on your own risk, please.
Well I understand that with Dynamesh, but I fail to see why it’s a big deal, generally you don’t use dynamesh for a final mesh and you retopologize after. You do lose some detail if you lower the dynamesh settings but generally you don’t really need to do that because you’re gonna do retopo anyway. Zbrush also allows for projecting detail from one mesh onto the other. <- This is what I meant as to why I don’t see auto dynamesh as such a big deal. If you don’t want to retopo you just decimate the mesh after you’re done, and decimation keeps basically all of your detail for the most part.
Michalis, I get your issue with the brushes in zbrush only displacing the mesh. It would be a nifty feature to get from zbrush but I don’t see it as being the next big feature set in zbrush. I would prefer to see better texture painting tools (Layers like photoshop for example) and better ways to make seams for UV’s.
you can manipulate the uvs with UVMaster with transpose and move brush; however you need to have no sub-d levels. There is a button called “Flatten” in the UVMaster panel. Be sure you don’t rotate the view though, just use camera pan (on ZB4R5 it use to break uvs sont know on the new version didn’t check).
@yii7
I’m aware of the UVmaster. I’m also aware of the weird behavior of the UV panel, which is useful in some cases. Especially when combined with polygroups.
A decent UV editor is missing. Multiple UV sets etc etc . Texture painting?
I know, Pixo’s perspective is different. Model, sculpt in hires as you like, Vpaint and bake. However, the introduction of boxmodeling is a bit inconsistent. How to polypaint (vpaint) on a non evenly distributed mesh?
Dynamesh w/ proper settings for the most part. I do hope their next major release though will have some focus on texture painting though…seems like they just dont care much about it anymore. Also if one does polygroups on the lowpoly/box modeling, they can use the guides created from that to ZRemesh it to have even quads, then crank up the multi-rez with smoothing turned off.
Also probably not the most ideal solution, but they do have “dynatopo” in sculptris, so the topology is added in real time. Zbrush has an option to send what you are working on into sculptris and then have sculptris send it right back…so in a way they are still somewhat integrated.
