Actually Mudbox lets you work with a whole tree of meshes. It’s really a different tool in many ways because it’s designed to fit into a pipeline versus one man band. If you don’t want to use Mudbox’s starting points, then you pretty much start with a base mesh from a more typical modeling program such as Silo, Modo, or Maya. Personally, I use both Mudbox and ZB.
They are two different approaches to the same problem.
Mudbox is geared to users with a pipeline (such as create geometry, detail & paint, animate, render.)
Zbrush is geared to the all-in-one artist. It has tools for creating (zspheres), tools for detailing and paint, and rendering. ZBrush, unless you insist upon counting turntables, really doen’t support animating.
Mudbox plays nice with others including fairly reliable import/export including key elements such as UV in/out, Displacement and Normal maps.
Zbrush does not place nice with others, esp. ZB 3.12. It is quite fussy on UV import (less so in ZB3.1 vs 3.0), and its map generation is broken in ZB3.12. Without map generation, it is difficult to incorporate ZB3.12 model into a pipeline, requiring a mix of PC and Mac tools. This is OK for larger shops, but smaller one-man shops which are Mac-only are SOL.
I’ve also come to seperate the two companies. Autodesk is a big, heartless bureacracy. Pixologic is little, heartless, and often petty operation. (Note the deleted threads they don’t like, the pissing off od Wayne Robson, the inability to even make an accurate statement about bug fixes, etc.)
I like ZB the product, but Pixologic’s attitude is a “take it or leave it.” On the other hand, Pixologic so far has given free upgrades for life. Autodesk will inevitably try to get $200-300/year out of Mudbox users once they hit their stride.
Neither product is ideal. On the Mac platform, ZB is essentially a closed system. This will suffice for single users with little or no intent to render outside of ZB. Shops that need a pipeline will have to to look to other players like Mudbox, Silo, or Modo for sculpting tools.
Since I’m also a teacher with private students, their is another key difference between the products. ZBrush is very steep in learning curve and its user interface can be difficult for novices to manage. For most new users, Mudbox is far more approachable.
I personally believe that, should Pixologic continue to innovate, that users will “graduate” from Mudbox to Zbrush over time. However, this will depend somewhat on Pixologic. My past experience (and that of several of my students on Macs) is that Pixologic is driving their own customers into the arms of Mudbox, if only for the safety of a reliable, interoperable solution. I expect they will be disappointed ovet time in some of Mudbox’s shortcomings. These include: hefty workstation requirements, lower polygon counts than ZB, and (as you have pointed out) no geometry creation tools. I also find that Zbrush, to me, feels more fluid (having worked extensively in both on the PC under Vista.)
Do I plan to keep using mudbox in pipeline projects? Yes. Do I plan on using ZBrush for ground up figure design? Yes. If you can afford both, I recommend both since they do different things. If can you afford only one, then you have to evaluate what you will be doing with the sculptures. If you’re playing in a production pipeline (create-detail-animate-render) with real deadlines, you may want to consider Mudbox. If you are a sculptor who demands the most powerful sculpting environment, you’ll probably want ZB (if you can stand the quirks.) If you’re on a PC and need RAID (say for video editing) you’re hosed with ZB right now.
It is certainly my hope that Pixologic mends it ways with respect to customer relations, but watching threads and people disappear is probably not going to convince me (or anyone else following the ZB vs Mudbox discussions) that ZB truly understands how many of us would like to see them succeed and how disappointed we are in the flawed 3.12 release and their flawed DRM system.
-K
So that’s what happened to Wayne.