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ZBrush Educational Licence or Sculptris

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi all, I’m new here, I only used ZBrush for the first time yesterday at Uni because I wanted to get a taste for it before we start using more of it next year. I’ve been a Mudbox boy until now and can never quite say I’ve loved it. If I have one complaint with ZBrush it’s the controls, but that’s manageable. What I was wondering is if people would recommend getting a full educational Licence (still not sure how much it costs, anyone else got one who can tell me?) Or whether I should just stick to Sculptris at home and use ZBrush at school. how similar are they? Can I easily take a model from one program to the next? Would I be missing out on a large number of features from ZBrush that aren’t present in Sculptris?

What are your thoughts?

I look forward to using some more of these programs, I’m about to start work on a solo project making a Zombie/Infection game in the CryEngine and thought I’d use ZBrush for all the modelling of normal maps and so fourth so maybe I’ll post up some of the work from that.

Cheers

Tazor

#2

Zbrush and Sculptris are similar, but in no way an exact 1 to 1.

Moving a mesh from one application to another during a working file isn’t really recommended as Sculptris uses dynamic tessellation while Zbrush is a subD modeling program using MRE. Basically, one makes a lot of little triangles, and the other uses quads and doesn’t like triangles.

You can work from Zbrush to Sculptris pretty easy, but sculptris to Z is a pain.
But it really all depends on what you’re doing.

Zbrush does have a ton of features that Sculptris doesn’t have, but you might not be missing them either way depending on the work you’re doing with the programs.

#3

Educational licenses seem to float around the $430-470 range, where as a full commercial license is only around $699 or less. If you plan on using zbrush in your future, I think it’s worth putting down the extra few hundred to own.