ZBrushCentral

Best 3D software for building a city?

Community
#1

I am currently working with Zbrush for organic modeling and Illustration, and Strata for simple 3D when I require an element in an illustration, my main skillset, however, is illustrator and Photoshop. I am currently putting the finishing touches on a piece for my local chamber of commerce of our entire city done in Illustrator. The broker on this project would like to give me similar projects in the future, but I’m wondering if there is a 3D solution to better produce an entire city with a fair amount of detail. I’ve used Strata for some architecture in the past, and it has been OK aside from gobbling up memory, but I’m looking to move away from Strata, to a more forward-thinking and professional quality modeling (and animation) program. It would probably be a good idea to be Zbrush compatible, but that’s not a deal breaker, as they would probably not be used in concert with one another very often, anyway. Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Paulcipher

#2

Maya.

#3

Most people I know prefer V-ray or Maxwell for Arch-Vis (rendering). Not that you cant get good results with Mental Ray, it just takes a lot more work to do so. They do Vray for Max, Maya, Rhino, C4d…pretty much everything but XSI :frowning: Maxwell seems to have a pluginfor just about everything, and may in fact have a standalone…I dont know. Those are third party renderers, and costly on top of an already expensive animation package.

As far as modeling buildings, that’s pretty simple stuff, and any halfway decent modeler will handle it fine; I see no particularly compelling reason to recommend one over the other in this regard. A lot of people are using SketchUp for quick city building and arch work…and I believe V-ray is availiable for it too. It’s not much for animation though.

It depends on the level of animation you want to do. For top level character animation youre going to want to go MAX, Maya, or XSI, depending on your target sub-industry(games, film, etc). If your animation needs are simpler, you might want to give C4D a look…many of the Strata users I knew from (way) back in the day made the transition to C4D…cheaper than some of your other options.

The absolute best value for a powerful, fully featured program with top notch modeling and animation you could that was in Strata’s ballpark pricewise would be XSI Foundation…except no V-ray there.

As far as Zbrush, any program that supports normal and displacement mapping will work with Zbrush, though not all displacement rendering is created equally. You’ll want to research subpixel/micropoly displacement, and make sure your target program is advanced enough to really get the most out of Z, and see what other users have done with it.

#4

As said before, most applications will do just fine for what you have described. In addition to what was stated before, Lightwave + LWCAD works very nicely for archviz. Excellent renderer, excellent modeling tools, good basic animation tools, etc; all that you need.

But honestly, as stated in most “best 3D app” threads, try out the demos of some of the different applications and make the decision based on your own preference.

#5

Thank you all for your insights on this. Looks like I have multiple solutions, and lots of demos to try out. :slight_smile:

#6

And just to throw another consideration into the fray :eek: , do take a look at Houdini. From what you describe the USD2k Houdini Escape version (no dynamics / particles) will be sufficient for you needs, and for the price is comparable to other s/w.

Houdini will allow you to build your cities procedurally - [http://www.cmivfx.com/product_houdini_cities.asp](http://www.cmivfx.com/product_houdini_cities.asp) . This approach may initially take longer to setup, but if this is an area you think you'll be doing more work in come the future, it may be worth your while - that is, once setup you can reuse it to procedurally generate a new look quickly. Houdini's renderer, Mantra, is a scan-line ray-trace hybrid that handles micropolygon displacements very efficiently. It's no Vray in the archViz arena (yet), but it is in active development and could be heading in that direction judging by a recent post on CGTalk - [http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=563864](http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=563864) (fyi: the poster, jasoniversen, worked with a beta Mantra9 pipeline on Transformers while he was at Digital Domain, so has good links with Side Effects in order to form his opinions.) - here's what he said:

The only (potential) stumbling block with anyone considering Houdini is the supposed steep learning curve they’ve probably heard about. I’d just say here that such views were formed many years ago when Houdini was an entirely different beast and with little available training to accompany it - but mud sticks :stuck_out_tongue: . Today, Houdini is closer aligned to the more familiar standards of the industry than what it was and has increasingly more learning materials / training availablity to back it up - so it’s pretty much like learning any other app from scratch really. And of course there is the free Houdini Apprentice learning edition, fully featured, save a couple of minor restrictions (small water mark and PAL max resolution limit) - http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=221

:)