ZBrushCentral

My Final Decision: Max And Zbrush

For a long time I was researching to decide a new software to learn. I was about to go with Maya and Zbrush, because I have training DVDs and books for them already. But I’m having hard time keeping my models in quads and when I import to Zbrush, getting errors which is totally normal because it happens if you don’t have enough knowledge and practice to learn how to maintain your geometry. These happens to me all the time…

When I talk about this with my friend Serdal Ertas who is a successful 3ds Max user told me there’s an export option on Max which was a plug-in in the past but integrated to it because of it’s popularity. And it helps you to export for Zbrush with quad faces. I decided to test it; I imported the head model I’ve done in Maya with triangle problems to 3ds Max and exported it with using this exporters options.

And I really am surprised when I imported the geometry to Zbrush because I had no errors about Quad faces. Max exported a clean geometry… Actually cleaned up my mess. You should know that I’m not the best modeler in the world and I’m a newbie on character modeling. Using Maya since 6.5 but still didn’t learned a lot of things on it. After all these Max and Zbrush looked like a better tool set to me and decided to focus on these both.

I’m not defending my lack of ability to keep everything in Quads and cleaning geometry myself - but the tools in/for 3ds max are convinced me to go with it…

Please visit my blog post for screen shots if you interested

i’m a 3ds max user and love it. but i think your reasoning from switching from maya to max is a bit weird. i think you are getting errors/unclean mesh from maya because your just not exporting it properly or the models are bad. the amount of films, tv, video games and illustrations made with a maya>zbrush>maya pipeline shows there isn’t a problem. you may want to look into the problems your having before switching from one package to another.

I was expecting a comment like that because this is true. its weird reason… And as I said there’s no excuse for being lack of modeling properly.

The office I’m working right now has both Maya and Max - they let me work with Maya since I’m using it for a long time (but still I’m way better with C4D/Vue combination but it’s not fitting their pipeline for now) In my country (Turkey) Max is THE tool to get a 3D job (I know it’s also weird)

Since I started working on there guys showed me the abilities and many cool plug-ins for 3ds max… Also small things like exporting / importing with presets which is making life easier.

Do you know an exporting plug-in like that for Maya? Would be very cool…