Zbrush Vs 3d Coat

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Zacharie Brodhacker

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Aug 3, 2024, 6:03:23 PM8/3/24

to lessblunefney

z brush has way more commercial training , but that because its so complicated. You will find it less necessary with 3d coat. coat has a ton of very innovative features but its WAY more intuitive than z brush. coat is better IMO in areas of retopo, uvs, sub tools, painting textures. by default z brush sculpt brushes feel nicer but you can tweak coat to feel more or less the same. coat doenst have the nice deformation tools of zbrush, but some of the surface brushes can mimick it. way more freedom in coat to concept sculpt. coat is way more stable than z brush. i find z brush crashes quite a bit . even tho it saves your info almost always. in contrast coat rarely crashes. you can right click and export entire voxel hierachy out as an obj which you can open as tool in zbrush and split to subtools. the coat UI is fastly superior to zbrush. when z brush first came out i thought it was so innovative. but over time i found it clumsy and unintuitive and literally found i had to watch hours of tutorials to keep up. id rather create art.

4: Can Coat sculpt on the basis of mesh sub d sculpting with adjustable levels on the fly, working and retaining the original base mesh, if so how does it compare in terms of polygon count, how high can it go while remain smooth in opperation?

If you are trying to weigh ZBrush vs 3D Coat for the purposes of making a purchase decision, it really comes down to how much are you going to be using either for sculpting? If it's predominantly for sculpting, you might find ZBrush the better choice, if price isn't that important. IMHO, 3D Coat isn't far behind ZBrush in terms of sculpting capability. It's a better sculpting app than Mudbox, overall, and that puts it in very good company.

However, the better question is "If 3D Coat had no sculpting tools, would it still be worth the cost, as a PBR Texture Painting, UV Editing and Retopology application?" As objectively as I can state it....absolutely. These are the areas where it outclasses ZBrush. It's closer to ZBrush as a sculpting app than ZBrush is to 3D Coat as a texture painting app.

1. I used ZB v2 a lot, v3 a lot, off and on with v4. I think v4 is pretty amazing though. I pretty much use 3DC for almost everything it can do, with a heavier focus on painting, sculpting and baking.

Im checking out the Curve tool right now. Can this be used to produce a armature in which can be used to sculpt on as either a Voxel mesh or normal polygon mesh that has been auto topology produced (low poly base mesh). In Zbrush I build up the Zsphears, rotate, scale and position them in 3d space, then produce a auto re-topologized mesh that can then be sub devided as the sculpt progresses?

Regarding meshes, I asume there is two methods in which 3DCoat works, 1: Voxel based, and 2: Sub D mesh in which retains the topology from the original base mesh such as one imported allows you to keep sub dividing with full sub d levels to move up and down as you please?

If I where to work in Sub D sculpting, not voxels, how many levels can you achieve until 3DCoat slows down, I know this is different from one system to another? Once your sub d model is sculpted, how easy is it to produce a displacement, or normal map from this stage, this is assuming my model I was sculpting on was imported with ideal topology? n Zbrush its the simple case of Importing a mesh, store its current state (morph target) then start sculpting away adding many sub d levels as needed, in this mode I can sculpt at 86m polys without no UI slow down. Then I return back to sub d level 1 restore to original mesh state (Morph Target restore) the produce my displacement, normal,maps with a single button press.

The Proxy Slider lets you quickly choose what SubD level to (cache) step down to. Rather than applying changes up a stack of SubD levels, 3D Coat stores the original state of the object, on your hard drive and temporarily replaces it with a lower subD level version (Proxy). When you uncache the layer, 3D Coat translates any changes made to the proxy, to the original version.

Thank you for these videos, this has cleared allot up. Am I correct in thinking that in order to work on a lower resolution you must use a decemated version in which gets cached? If this is the case then this opens up some problems.

If 3dCoat need to create a decimated mesh in order to work on the low poly version, does this mean that there is no direct deformation link between the original imported cage mesh and whats being sculpted? If this is the case, if you deform the mesh in sculpting or on the decimated mesh, how does the original imported mesh that essencialy is your topology cage get deformed along with the changes you made during sculpting?

In Zbrush im always working on the imported mesh that contains the topology. What ever changes I make to the original cage mesh gets pushed into the higher sub d levels, and vice versa, but I can restore the original cage mesh at any time. This workflow lets me make changes to the topology that aids in the sculpting in areas such as the tightness of the edge loops for the lips, eye lids, finger nails e.c.t. If I like the changes that the sculpting has made to my original imported mesh I can then stick to these changes on the cage mesh in which becomes my new and final cage mesh. This new cage mesh then aids in holding volume and detail needing the displacement maps having to do less work, and thus producing better quality renders.

So in short, can I sub divide the original imported mesh that is my final topology mesh, and sculpt directly onto that and choose if my sculpting effects my cage mesh, and can I move up and down these sub d levels letting me adjust my cage mesh at any time which then pushes these changes to my higher sub d levels?

Because Voxels and Dynamic Tessellation are much different technology, you have to get the quad mesh approach out of your head. 3D Coat handles it differently, but the result is the same. What you cache is the current state of a given object/layer. What you get in it's place is a Proxy (decimated copy). Whatever changes you make to the PROXY (Low Poly) gets translated to the cached object (High Poly version), once you uncache the layer.

If you want to use the original base mesh as your target mesh, for baking all the details onto, you can do so in 3D Coat by importing a copy of it into the Retopo Workspace FIRST. There is an option in the Sculpt Workspace to Conform the Retopo (Target) mesh. 3D Coat keeps the two different mesh types (High Poly/Voxel SCULPT OBJECT and Low Poly RETOPO OBJECT/MESH) separated in the app.

Thanks AbnRanger, so to clarify, the Conform is working more like a shrink wrap approximation, rather than vert for vert direct manipulation in which you cannot simply say use the pinch tool on your retopo, and that pinch updates to the sculpted mesh? As you say 3D coat separates the process, and from the videos I get that the retopo mesh has abolutly no link with the sculpting mesh during the sculpting process as is simply used to produce the displacement,normal maps as a point of refference between the surface of the retopo and the voxel sculpted mesh?