Ah I see! Excellent points very thought provoking post. I am starting to understand the points you touched on. So let’s see what I have been doing yesterday. I pick zsphere, make a skeleton, make a mesh out of it, turn it into dynamesh, sculpt it with standard, move and clay buildup brushes, use polygroups, masking and transpose like crazy, refine the sculpt with polish dam standard and also a bit of inflate brush, retopo, project the lowres, subdivide to 1 million or so, refine and polish and relax, later will use masking and groups to put surface detail and paint. Bellow are some noob examples of first tries rendered in keyshot or zbrush. Notice the material blur on the wheel! Another work flow could be to just go from dynamesh to decimation for hard surface modeling. Another one, ummm make crazy mechanical objects just using alpha and radial symmetry in shadow box. Or then zproject the crazy pattern on a model and turn it into a crazy armor! Or turn alphas to 3d directly! Snapshot model, grab alpha and then make it 3D again! It isn’t hard to pick work flows in zbrush as you yourself layed out sensible work flows. Even with a few days of study I could pick this up because ZB is so simple. Zbrush is a very simple app and it is making the design of complex objects easy, something that a cad system is not meant to do. Cad systems do the opposite. They make the design of simple stuff very difficult or even impossible.
But I see for example that the spacing slider in brush properties is always grayed out!! Such a thing is never tolerated in a cad system. In zbrush they quietly gray out the spacing slider and people just turn to lazy mouse or roll option to get the job done and won’t complain. I see a thread several years old about a fatal crash in noise maker that I experienced during my first few days and the bug is still there! See what I mean? Zbrush is a very simple program, it just carelessly pushes data around, the data isn’t critical as is in a cad system. In a cad system the tolerance is 0.001 mm. Of course it needs a lot of cpu power to calculate that and the system could be very unstable because it is constantly solving high degree equations and that is expected. ZB does use some exclusive algorithms, but that’s about it. Everything else is left alone. You are right, the possibilities for creativity is endless but that is more a result of the loose sandbox nature of zbrush, and it is meant to be that way and I admit it is a good thing too but that doesn’t mean the user should be forced to tolerate weak or outright silly execution like we see in softwares like photoshop for example. As I said zbrush seems to me or at least compared with those monster cad systems like a very simple sandbox style software. Quite childish even. It also seems to be quite large for what it is! The installer shouldn’t be over a couple hundred megabytes.
Endless possibilities is a good thing but it makes developing a specific and sensible style even harder. My problem is not exactly developing work flow, it just takes me a few days to watch tutorials and read the documentation, and listen to experienced users like yourself, and I am quite a dumb person even. Chaotic experimentation is a good start but I hope to develop a coherent and orderly style in the end. It could be some kind of limitation on my part.
I did try sculptris for a few minutes but it felt like drinking water with a spoon.
