Mudbox vs. Zbrush

[Marcus Dublin]

To use modeling_man’s analogy I would have to say that I’m dating both apps at the same time. In short, I use them both evenly and have come to appreciate their strengths and weaknesses.

So in your case it’s worth playing with both programs to see which one works best for you in the early going. When you feel that you’ve gotten pretty good at one tool try the other one, you may eventually find yourself using both programs regularly and loving it! Good luck.:thumb:

[Deto]

modeling_man : Infact I was in love with ZBrush too at first, but mudbox kinda dragged me in, even the older one which was way inferior to ZBrush. It simply was so easy.. I couldn't be arsed to do puzzle for every model even if it meant I could do more with it

But with new mudbox, it really doesn't matter which one to choose. Both can do almost the samething.

which has been said so many times my reply is kinda pointless

[Ged]

I like both zbrush and mudbox, I was really looking forward to mudbox 2009 but I dont know I just wasnt impressed with the way theyve made mudbox some kind of elitist app with silly hardware requirements. I reckon they should take on the competition(zbrush) head to head and try to create an application which runs on just as many systems just as well.

Still I like the progress made with mudbox and way prefer the interface over zbrushs workaround crazyness

[mr_ace]

i really can't get into zbrush, so i hope mudbox becomes standard so i never have to learn zbrush lol. i find the zbrush interface is so counter-intuituve, the meshes don't represent what they actually look like properly, and it seems the developers took every option or menu or shortcut we all know from other apps and thought 'wouldn't it be fun to put these somewhere you'd never expect them to be, and make ppl find them, you know just for fun?'

it's one of those things i guess you've just gotta sit down and get past all the initial gripes, which i guess was easy for all u guys, because wen zbrush came out and you all first starting learning it, you didn't have an alternative.

however, what are zbrushes advantages? zspheres and UV options etc are the only ones i can think of.

[Ged]

zbrush seems to run a bit better on older hardware in my opinion. It has subtools so you can create meshes using other meshes, it has zspheres so you can be free with your basemesh ideas and it has a more advanced painting system than mudbox as well as transpose tools to pose models and the ability to export a turntable animation and some really nice fast material rendering and the uv options and also retopology tools. So it is packed with more features but as you say they arent simple to use or easy to find in the interface.

really zspheres arent nearly as exciting to me as 3D coats voxel sculpting though, I really am impressed with the development going on there.

[jandaku cintaku]

right now i'm trying to get along with zbrush, i like zbrush appearance and how it interact with what i want...but as far as i can say it really depends on us the user...it pretty much like max and maya short of things ( and question )..i use zbrush since it the first brush software that i know..maybe in the future i'll flirt with mudbox and see how it respond....

[janus]

... and it has a more advanced painting system than mudbox

Sorry but that is way wrong..... zb is poly painting that is directly linked to your polygon count and as such cannot give you as chrisp a texture as mudbox can. Mudbox paints more map types than your ever going to need while allowing you to view them real time. Zb allows you to pain your diffuse map and if you use the bump shader a bump as well. So no zb is not a more advanced painting system.

In regards to the hardeware, the service pack open up alot more hardware to mudbox that wasn't able to be used...although dont expect it to run on a very very old machine.

Wayne...

[devoid]

Might as well throw my two cents in here as well. I have/use them both, but i prefer zbrush. Originally couldn't grasp zbrush at all - when mudbox came out i loved it till zbrush3 came out. At work we got zbrush, so i tried to learn it. For some reason my second time around with the program there was an epiphany moment, everything just clicked. All the issues with the interface went away after my first full model. Highly recommend zbrush character creation by scott spencer book. The other real reason i find zbrush superior is the community over at zbrush central. The amount of user created tools and tutorials is really incredible.
In the end though they are similar programs doing the same thing, and as with all of these debates whichever one you end up using more will become your favorite.

[Ged]

Sorry but that is way wrong..... zb is poly painting that is directly linked to your polygon count and as such cannot give you as chrisp a texture as mudbox can. Mudbox paints more map types than your ever going to need while allowing you to view them real time. Zb allows you to pain your diffuse map and if you use the bump shader a bump as well. So no zb is not a more advanced painting system.

In regards to the hardeware, the service pack open up alot more hardware to mudbox that wasn't able to be used...although dont expect it to run on a very very old machine.

Wayne...

I didnt mean technologically advanced sorry for the confusion, I just mean the way you can paint in zbrush feels more expressive in its options in my opinion, the brush in mudbox 2009 feels very basic but I think your definitely right the technology in mudbox 2009 being more useful, still need to play with that more with mudbox 2009 but it didnt run very well on my work pc. It was just my opinion after my first impression of the toolset.

[kongni]

Great to see such a lively thread without anyone getting flaming mad

I'm using both right now and together they make a great package.

The strength and weakness of Mudbox I'm finding is that I can push more polys on a single mesh than in ZBrush. The downside to that is that when I want to bring my pretty high detail mesh into Zbrush for rendering, ZBrush runs out of memory. I then have to break up the mesh and bring the pieces in as subtools. Boo!

I'm really enjoying the ease of sculpting in Mudbox. I miss the pretty ZBrush matcaps though.

Painting on your high detail mesh in Mudbox is really nice but BOTH programs have the crappiest color pickers EVAR!!!

Mudbox claims to have an occlusion masking workflow that allows you to paint an occlusion mask based on the fake occlusion filter they provide. I got terrible results. You're better off baking everything through a program like XNormal.

Also, if you don't have qualified Autodesk hardware and a dual monitor setup running Mudbox and Maya at the same time, don't be surprised if you start getting all kinds of rendering artifacts that will drive you crazy. Yup.

Also, Mudbox claims to have a WYSIWYG display of your realtime model so there is less guesswork on how your textured model will look like in-game. However, I'm finding that the normal maps look terrible compared to Maya, Max, or ZBrush...

Also, has anyone gotten a CGFX shader to work in Mudbox?

[garethcowboy]

I'm new to both softwares but I have to say I like zbrush more. It's hard at the beginning no doubt, since I came from conventional 3d package,
but once I got a hang of zbrush I found it actually took a new way of treating 3d, instead of following old perspectives, and the result is despite downright confusing for traditional 3d users at first, it offers some really intuitive workflows for non traditional 3d users like traditional artist-and I dare say when oldschool 3d users got used to it it's great for them too-and some fairly strange but really powerful ways to manipulate meshes, some functions I would never have dreamt to have in a conventional 3d software, like mudbox.

but there're some serious design flaws in zbrush too-at least to me, some are rather basic functions that it lacks, and the software itself is not really well documented-to me the zbrushCental's forum search is the only decent way to get info. And like MM said you have to use topology mask when dealing with close surfaces..

mudbox rocks when u want to paint texture in different layers-it's just easy, and powerful, zbrush doesn't even handle real texture painting. but you have other options in zbrush that give u texture and they are cool too. Anyway to sum up my opinion zbrush is a new idea, there're a lot of new possiblities growing in it's environment and it definitely worth spent some time reading tutorials and try it out.

[Blenderhead]

Pretty unanimous Z-Brush verdict. I would be interested to know if this is just because people scult in Z-Brush, but don't try to take anything back out of it, either for low-poly or just rendering. I think it is the least user-friendly program in the universe in this respect. You need to shell out so much cash to get a definitive workflow, as far as I believe. Mr.Dublin's PDF tut is great in this respect, but Z-Brush is what, a decade old now? They really should have gotten their act together by now.

Any mudbox tuts I have seen make it look like a piece of cake compared to Z-Brush. However, the guys who created Mudbox figured nobody actually does 3D on a laptop; apparently my 3 year old laptop's video card doesn't play nice with Mudbox and every time I try to make a stroke, it actually happens an inch higher than I drew on screen. So I will have to wait till I buy a new laptop to use it, because I have tried numerous driver updates, all to no avail.