Help Making a decision

[system]

I’m a hobbyist, my main interest is animation and I have some experience in 2D animation. I have placed 2D aside for a few years now and migrated to 3D.

I have several applications already, Carrara, Messiah, Hexagon, Blender, and Silo(which I don’t really like).

I want to model, rig and animate my characters.

I am very comfortable with Hexagon as a modeler, and can pretty much model the character body adequately with that tool. The issue is with the head, no …not the software …just my ability to use polygon modeling and construct a head that’s animate-able.

So I’m looking at a different approach here. I played around with the sculpting tool in Blender …but never could get a model that has the correct topology for proper animation.

Just one more piece of information … I am 100% interested in stylized characters …cartoon characters …like incredibles …over the hedge …etc. In other words I have no interest in creating realized barbie looking characters.

Here are my questions:

#1
With retopology …you can sculpt your model like a piece of clay …and use the retopology function to assign quads to the model …then export the model (i.e. OBJ format) and use it like a regular polygon model …RIGHT?

#2
This is what I want to do. Is this something …I COULD MAYBE DO with Z-Brush …but not something the software is really designed to do?
I am trying to wade through the fan-boy response here …please just the truth.

#3
I have the Z Brush demo …I think the sculpting tools are excellent (even if I don’t yet have the skills I’ve seen enough work by others to be convinced they are adequate). But how adept is Z-Brush and it’s retopology tools?

I’m asking because I’m also looking at 3D Coat …but I really get this feeling that 3DC is a lot more hype than the reality. Things just seem amateure-ish, despite the claim that its easy to use … it just doesn’t seem that way to me and their user manual is woe-fully lacking …or at least not written for a newbie like myself.

#4
Can someone comment about use zbrush with a wacom tablet or a tablet-PC (I have both).

#5

What don’t I know now that I will wish I know if I buy Z Brush?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Extra_Dimensional]

I do not animate.

That being said I understand what it takes to do so and can answer your questions. I also use Hexagon as my main modelling app, have experience with Silo which I also did not like (but kind of did a little), have used Carrara since way back when it was Ray Dream Studio and a long time zbrush “fanboy” as you put it, but it’s not the blind kind of fanboyism, it’s a mature kind as I’ve had my fair share of heartaches with this software and have endured all of it’s growing pains, but always with a strong desire to push on and grin and bear it as the working potential is worth it. For every ounce of soul crushing defeat you gain a pound of solid gold with this program which is a more than equitable trade off as far as software is concerned.

My answers:

1. Retopology. Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. You sculpt out roughly and in fine detail, but for animation you want clean topology, so you retopologize over all of that high res information into clean flowing loops and strips with borders that make sense for the parts you need to animate and their functions.

2. Again yes to both. You can retopologize here in Zbrush, but it’s bare-bones retopology and not feature rich. It’s nice to have, but you will be doing rudimentary retopology vertex by vertex here, placing out each indivdual polygon by hand which is more time consuming than anything else. Other more practical and efficient solutions are available.

3d Coat has great videos on their retopo tools although I cannot for the life of me stand that application it’s a pain for me to use to the point where it almost physically hurts it’s so awkward.

I use Topogun to retopologize and while primitive and buggy it suffices in a fashion that is slightly more advanced than zbrushes bare-bones retopo approach. Topogun really is nice and efficient and user friendly while being fast to learn and retopo with although again, it’s extremely feature-limited in that you will end up placing vertex by vertex face by face while retopoing anyway. It also has problems with flipping normals around and no smoothing brushes etc…so the advanced feature set ends up causing more problems than it solves so you end up not using them and just going point by point since in the end it’s more efficient. I have hope for future iterations though as if they implemented some more modern thinking into the approach and fixed the issues it would be pretty much all you need.

Or ideally if Pixologic focused more on it then that of course would be ideal. Some of the stuff you can do with 3dsmax 2011 is amazing in terms of retopologizing with the Freefrom Graphite tools that blow anything else I’ve seen out of the water, but that’s in an entirely different league in terms of cost. You can’t expect Pixo to provide us with all of that kind of stuff on top of what they already incorporate as it’s probably an incredibly complex task. Maybe one day you never know with these guys what they will come up with next except that it will always surprise you and you won’t see it coming and it will change everything, like UVMaster.

Question 3 is covered by answer to 2.

Question 4, I use Wacom for over a decade it’s fine with Zbrush. They keep improving the Table responsiveness here every iteration so nothing to worry about except the occasional weird issue with drivers acting up, but nothing that can’t be fixed by reverting to older versions. Works smoothly “out of the box” with lots of options for adjustments to user taste and a few more options added recently to really fine tune your brushes using pen pressure and how the brush curves apply to your stroke based on pressure. Not much more you could ask for.

Question 5, you won’t know what happened to the time. I have a stack of dishes sitting next to me on my desk here from last week because I have been so absorbed in zbrush and I’ve been using this app for almost a decade daily. It will consume your free time.

On a negative side, I guess it’s safe to say we all experience random crashes from time to time so save often and in different iterations as zbrush will be prone to crash from time to time randomly with no rhyme or reason. You could use it for 8 hours with no problem, and then in the span of 15 minutes you could have it crash 20 times all while doing the exact same thing you’ve done thousands of times with no crash. That sort of stuff you will come to expect and prepare for. But if you’ve used PC’s long enough it’s …not a perfect world so c’est la vie you just learn to save alot and never think you’re safe from a crash. Save every time you start to feel “happy” with your work because Zbrush has an internal sensor that monitors your enthusiasm level and goes critical anytime you start to feel too happy with your work and to bring you down to earth will crash on you to keep you humble Seriously though that’s about as bad as it gets if you learn to use all the tools right you encounter very few problems that a little research won’t solve.

Got to go, Simpsons are on.

[system]

Thanks a lot for your candid response. I think I can make a decision based on what you’ve told me.

It’s already a mental hurdle to commit financially to buying zbrush …if retopology isn’t feature rich in zbrush … all bets are off. I can’t see spending this money now for a system that doesn’t do all that I want in a through manner.

I’ll have to look at other options to achieve my goals…again many thanks.

[Extra_Dimensional]

Don’t forget to check back in Zbrush version 4 whenever it comes out. They like to surprise us with things we never saw coming. Who knows, maybe they’ll come up with some revolutionary new artistic way to retopologize with all the other goodies they’re adding. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

In any case, best of luck and check back again in future versions as again, you never know how far they will go with this program.