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ZBrush Beginner - Simplest question of all time

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#1

Hi all,

I’m totally new to the world of 3D Art, I work full time and I’ve never studied anything along even closely related to this field.

I’ve been trying to find an answer to one question but after almost an entire day of searching I still can’t find any information so hopefully someone here can help.

I am interested in jumping into the world of 3D art - I love drawing (particularly in photoshop) and I’m fascinated by the 3D space and looking to develop some skill on a hobbyist level. My particular area of interest is in character design, modelling and sculpting.

From my initial research, ZBrush seems like the best fit for me but there is one thing nagging at me; a huge amount of tutorials I find online focus on ZBrush + Maya or 3DS Max when creating something such as a character. Since i’m not really on a budget allowing me to buy up all the 3D software kicking around I wanted to know if ZBrush is a powerful enough tool to achieve the goals I outlined above, or am I going to find myself limited in some terrible way?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

#2

Hi! You will never regret buying Zbrush, and you’ll have everything covered with it ffrom organic modeling possibilities to hard sufrace stuff. Retopology can be performed now in a pretty easy way as well. Uv maps can be generated and polypaint is a great texturing tool, you can import texture or do it by hand. The only thing Zbrush is not good for is making a rig that you can use in production, character animation is something I wouldn’t recommend doing in Zbrush and rendering is pretty bad still.

Not to mention Zbrush is pretty cheap, you can get a second hand licence for about 400$ and Pixologic will transfer it to your name for 50$. And once you have Zbrush licence every new release of the program is free upgrade. Go for it! :slight_smile:

#3

Definitely get Zbrush. As for Maya or Max try Blender, it’s a free open source alternative. It will take some effort to learn both Zbrush and Blender but together they’re highly capable of some really great work.

www.blender.org

#4

Thanks for the replies.

For blender: is it capable of producing at least some how comparable results to Maya when used in conjunction with ZBrush?

#5

Absolutely. Blender is constantly being updated with new features and abilities. So far it’s been a very active open source project.

Take a look at their gallery page:

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/art-gallery/

#6

Oh and here’s a list of their features: http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

and some movies created with Blender: http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/movies/