10 Reasons why Mudbox really Sucks and Zbrush is Stupid

As a Game Artist so far, I see ZBrush as the more powerful app – at least from a feature point of view – maybe worflow too. But not interface. My co-CG gurus prefer Mudbox’s interface over ZBrush by a majority. I’m a newbie to ZBrush who recently got over the learning curve after a couple months.

If you are new to sculpting, this is the big question that you want answered: should you learn Mudbox? or zBrush?

Here are my ten reasons why Zbrush is better than Mudbox for Video Game Artists.

 

1. The ability to transpose your model in order to create multiple versions of your sculpt to achieve different appearances of clothing folds. This is very useful for normal map blending in your game shader.

2. Dropping to 2.5D mode in order to create tiling sculpts that can either be used as Normal Maps or Stencils inside of Zbrush. Very handy for environment artists.

3. ZApplink

4. Start with ZSpheres to quickly mock-in designs for quick iterations on sculpts rather than having to work in a 3D App first to import a base mesh

5. Retoplogy Tools for quickly constructing a new game mesh based on the sculpt.

6. Quick renders and turntables for sign-off purposes with Art Director.

7. The ability to record tutorials within ZBrush to help train other artists. No need to use a program like Camtasia.

8. More brush options for sculpting.

9. Polygroups and SubTools to help keep sculpt organized.

10. Great community support (ZBrush Central)

The problem with learning zBrush

ZBrush’s user interface is  a real pain in the ass. Its non-intuitive and non-traditional. 

Learning a program like Maya doesn’t help understand zBrush at all. If you come from a Blender background then you are certainly doomed. You have to force your brain to learn something entirely new when in Zbrush.

Using zBrush, you start from scratch. You can’t leverage anything else you know. So you’re not learning sculpting at all – you’re just learning how to use zBrush. You’re not spending time being creative, you’re spending yet more time learning technical tools and workarounds.

Now, this is what we do when we learn Maya! And this would be perfectly fine – if zBrush’s UI was an industry standard. But it isn’t. Maya is.

Anyways, For game development ZBrush is a complete solution. It would be nice if it had a better baking features though. Although these days lighting in game engines is becoming quite powerful and so texture baking isn’t quite as important as it used to be.

Having said that, I don’t think Mudbox is even trying to be a complete solution, so it’s probably not fair to compare the two when talking about complete packages.