I started this thread in the Zbrush forum but thought some might want to look at this as well

**Zbrush Core Mini **

This is actually fantastic. I like the PNG feature, which embeds the 3d model information into it. That's quite an interesting development, even though it's proprietary to Zbrush Core Mini, the PNG can still be viewed as a regular 2d image by any package which supports PNG, but yet it contains that additional 3d information for other Zbrush Core Mini users. Wow. I'm very impressed by that alone.

I got it this afternoon. It's pretty smooth and strongly oriented toward pushing that upgrade.

I bought ZbrushCore when it first came out and it was a great way to get familiar with the interface and eventually giving me the incentive to eventually move up to Zbrush itself

Well, I just downloaded it, but I can't guarantee I'll like it, because I tried Sculptris years ago, and absolutely hated it.

Yeah, I just watched a video about this half an hour ago. The tool is not for commercial use, educationnal purpose only.

@LuxXeon, that PNG 3D I thought it was something like SecondLife sculpted prim. A sculpted prim is a PNG where the RGBN chennels are used as XYZ vertices. Don't know how it deals with the faces though. Logical asembly I suppose. I am too interested in that format.

yarp posted at 3:06PM Fri, 12 June 2020 - #4391602

Yeah, I just watched a video about this half an hour ago. The tool is not for commercial use, educationnal purpose only.

I figured as much, since it's free.

Good catch Yarp! I uninstalled.

Miss B, Blender is free, and Sculptris has no such use restriction. Zbrush core mini is a disappointment, actually.

I've been poking at another free 3d sculpt program called meshmolder. It seems to have more of everything!

I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but I'm not expecting it to be anything like the full ZBrush Core, which I think Lobo told me about a while back. I would just like to try it out to see if I can get a handle on sculpting. I'm taking a Blender class at Udemy that has a sculpting lesson, and they also have a full on sculpting class that folks are producing some great items with.

Since I'm a long time user of Blender (since 2.4x), sculpting was something I was never able to get into, but would like to try. I know the UI's are totally different, but if I could at least get to a point where I could produce something, I'll be able to get through the Blender class.

I think sculpting is fun. The main advantage in Zbrush mini over Sculptris is the snake hook brush. That is a cool tool, though Sculptris has tools that can be used to give a similar result. Also, the mini interface is extremely simple. That being said, sculptris is still overall the more capable program. You can import obj meshes, export meshes, add spheres to increase the complexity of your model, turn the wireframe on and off, and so on.

I think a graphics tablet with pressure pen gives greater control over your mark-making process. The topology in these programs is all triangles. There is a freebie called instant mesh that does very nice algorithmic retopo. And your sculpting skills should transfer back to Blender.

Well I tried the ZbrushCore Mini, and was extremely disappointed after watching some tutorial videos on their site about the UI and such. I have a very old version of ZBrush, which I only use for remeshing, because older versions of Blender s*ck at it. Blender 2.8.x has supposedly fixed that, but I haven't ventured into the newer version of Blender yet.

The videos were for the full ZBrushCore, so the Mini version doesn't have the same UI and tools, so Torq, you are correct. It's disappointing.

As far as Sculptris goes, I tried it years ago and hated its UI, so maybe a current version is better. I'm not sure if I could get any sculpting done with my old ZBrush, but maybe I should try. The only thing I ever created was a Katana with a tutorial I had found years ago, and it didn't come out great, but it looked workable if I could export in OBJ, and then bring it into Blender. Unfortunately exporting to OBJ lost the details, so I never got a chance to try.

That's the sad part, Miss B. There is no current Sculptris. The last version was Alpha 6 from 2011. I think MeshMolder looks very competent, and I aim to put that through its paces over the weekend. As for remeshing, the Instant Meshes program I linked above might help with that. I think, if your class is using 2.8x and your computer can support it, it might be time to take the plunge for 2.8x. There are some good retopo plugins such as retopoflow and retopo MT.

BTW: Retopo Flow is open source. It's true! And a young person made an excellent video about that.

Torquinox posted at 12:29AM Sat, 13 June 2020 - #4391710

That's the sad part, Miss B. There is no current Sculptris. The last version was Alpha 6 from 2011. I think MeshMolder looks very competent, and I aim to put that through its paces over the weekend. As for remeshing, the Instant Meshes program I linked above might help with that. I think, if your class is using 2.8x and your computer can support it, it might be time to take the plunge for 2.8x. There are some good retopo plugins such as retopoflow and retopo MT.

Oh, OK. I hadn't looked at it in quite a while, so didn't know it was no longer available. That said, however, since they have the ZBrushCore, they don't really need it, so I guess not that surprising.

I downloaded MeshModler earlier, so will be looking at it in the next few days. It will be interesting to see if we have similar thoughts about it. I'll also check out Retopo Flow, and see how that goes.

As far as the class I'm taking, I've been taking it off and on for about 2 1/2 years (lifetime access), so it started with 2.79, and is "slowly" being updated to 2.8. The instructor is redoing the lessons, but it's been slow going. I couldn't install 2.8 on my old Win7 Pro laptop because the OpenGL was a bit too low. This Win10 Pro laptop's OpenGL is high enough, so at some point I'll add 2.8, so I can play with both. I do want to try out the EEVEE render engine for sure.

Anyway, thanks for the links, and I'll check back again after I've played with MeshModler.

Torquinox posted at 12:45AM Sat, 13 June 2020 - #4391711

BTW: Retopo Flow is open source. It's true! And a young person made an excellent video about that.

OK, I checked out the link at GitHub first, and there's a link further down to Blender Market that states it's $86. Then I checked out the video link at YouTube, and there was the link to Github "to get it free". The video showed the price a bit lower, so I'm surprised there's a CG Cookie link at GitHub to get it for a high price if it's open source. Anyway, I downloaded it and bookmarked the video.

That all sounds excellent, Miss B!

Sculptris is still available. Pixologic bought it a while back and has been offering it as a freebie. It's off their main site now, but it's still there.

I started playing with Meshmolder last night. The free version is a reduced build. It's buggy if you push it too hard. The alpha sculpt tool doesn't work (though controls are there). The slice tool and other features are not there. To get the latest build requires a $5 donation and they say they'll email within 24 hours. Not sure about all that. It's not the amount. It's the weirdness of the arrangement. Maybe if I decide to write an article about it...

Oh so Sculptris is still around. I'll have to keep it in mind, though I don't know what's been updated since I tried it years ago.

As for MeshMolder, I'll keep those things in mind, and yes I saw the "donation" link when I was there. I hope to play with it some today, so I'll let you know what I think later.

Torquinox posted at 8:30PM Sat, 13 June 2020 - #4391733

I started playing with Meshmolder last night. The free version is a reduced build. It's buggy if you push it too hard. The alpha sculpt tool doesn't work (though controls are there). The slice tool and other features are not there. To get the latest build requires a $5 donation and they say they'll email within 24 hours. Not sure about all that. It's not the amount. It's the weirdness of the arrangement. Maybe if I decide to write an article about it...

OK Torq, how did you get to work with Meshmolder, because as soon as I load it up, it gives me this error message, which I seem to remember from another piece of software years ago, though I don't remember which software, or how I got around it. Any suggestions?

Sorry Miss B. No idea why that happened to you. It could be your graphics card driver. There is a discussion on meshmolder forums about that problem in earlier versions. As I said, Meshmolder is buggy.

OK, I'll check out that discussion on their forums. I know I've seen something similar before, but can't recall which software it was.

I only have this laptop about 6 or 7 months so even if it were built earlier last year than I purchased it, the graphics card can't be that old. Also, I have tons of 2D and 3D graphics software on this puppy, and they're all behaving. I'm sure I'll figure it out at some point.

Edited to Add: OK, the person on their forum reporting the error with an earlier version of Meshmolder has an AMD graphics card. Mine's an Nvidia GTX 1660 ti, so very new like the Nvidia RTX cards.

Sounds like your system can handle blender 2.83. I'd go with that. Meshmolder is a nice toy (when it works), but you're ultimately headed for Blender sculpting anyway. Might as well dive in. I don't know how well it'll run on my system, but i just downloaded it, too.

Yes. Blender 2.83 sculpt is outstanding! Even with no tutorial or instructions, it's great! And it's stable. Clay tool to build up polygons. Smooth tool to smooth the surface. No doubt, there are tricks to it. Do give it a spin!

I will eventually.

Don't wait. Do it now.

@Miss B , I gotta agree with @Torquinox , if you're planning to use Blender for sculpting, you're better off starting there. None of the other free packages are going to offer any better place to start. SculpTris is probably the most straight forward. but you're literally a couple clicks from having a nearly identical set up in Blender; drop in a sphere, juice the polycount a bit, turn on dynamic subdivision in the sculpting tools, and its effectively the same as SculpTris. If you have anything more than a passing familiarity with Blender already, save yourself the time, and start there.

Torquinox posted at 9:02PM Sun, 14 June 2020 - #4391850

Don't wait. Do it now.

Well that didn't take you long at all.

Warlock279 posted at 9:02PM Sun, 14 June 2020 - #4391915

@Miss B , I gotta agree with @Torquinox , if you're planning to use Blender for sculpting, you're better off starting there. None of the other free packages are going to offer any better place to start. SculpTris is probably the most straight forward. but you're literally a couple clicks from having a nearly identical set up in Blender; drop in a sphere, juice the polycount a bit, turn on dynamic subdivision in the sculpting tools, and its effectively the same as SculpTris. If you have anything more than a passing familiarity with Blender already, save yourself the time, and start there.

Actually, I'm taking a Blender course that has a sculpting section, so I may try it in 2.79 first, mostly because I'm so used to it's UI, whereas I'd have to learn the new UI for 2.8x. There's also a specific Character Creator course using sculpting in Blender, though I think that class was specifically written for 2.8x, so I'll try the lesson in the class I'm signed up for before trying that one. I have seen some of the work the students have been producing, as these classes (and a bunch of gaming classes) are taught by a group of instructors who have a forum setup for their students. The character is an Orc, and I've been extremely impressed with some of the projects these folks are producing.

I think you will have a blast, Miss B! I watched some tuts today, the ones I pointed out in the tips thread. I just spent a little while fiddling now that I know a little more about the tools. The Blender people knocked it out of the park.

You know there are times I wish this forum had the ability to "Like" someone's post, because right now I'd have done so on this new screenshot of your sculpt. Very nicely done Torq.

Miss B posted at 10:00PM Sun, 14 June 2020 - #4391926

You know there are times I wish this forum had the ability to "Like" someone's post, because right now I'd have done so on this new screenshot of your sculpt. Very nicely done Torq.

Thanks Miss B! I'm glad you like it I'm looking forward to seeing what you do in your class.

In the class I'm taking, it's sculpting a head, so should be interesting.

Cool! An orc head? That should be a good experience!

No human, though some have done anime style heads.

The Orc is from the other class, which is the whole Orc body, and some have armor on them, so that's probably included as well. That class concentrates on character creation, so not likely for beginners.

I understand. Human heads are good, too. You'll learn a lot and have fun doing it!

Miss B posted at 12:14PM Mon, 15 June 2020 - #4391693

Well I tried the ZbrushCore Mini, and was extremely disappointed after watching some tutorial videos on their site about the UI and such. I have a very old version of ZBrush, which I only use for remeshing, because older versions of Blender s*ck at it. Blender 2.8.x has supposedly fixed that, but I haven't ventured into the newer version of Blender yet.

Blender 2.8x does have improved remeshing, which is great for a clean quad surface to sculpt on, but I still don't think it's a suitable solution to use as a final mesh. There is really no way to control the edge flow. That's fine for certain static assets like maybe a rock or something non-organic, but the edgeflow on the remeshed models is very difficult to properly unwrap and certainly not good for deformation or animation. Zremesher is probably still one of the best automatic retopology tools available because there's so many different ways to control edge flow and get a relatively decent topology from it using Zguides, symmetry, polygroups, crease edges, etc. It's possible to get a mesh topology that could be easily unwrapped and rigged for animation with some effort.

The only other automatic retopo solution I think can actually be useful for creating final meshes is Exoside Quad Remesher. There's an addon for Blender too. It's not free, but it produces some impressive low poly topology without much fuss. There aren't as many ways to control the edge flow as Zremesher, but in some cases, you don't really need to.

Aside from those two solutions, I've not really been convinced by any automatic remeshing solutions for use with a final mesh. I'm sure some people will think it is just fine for some things, but I've never been happy with edge flow. Retopology by hand using the right tools is still, to me, the ultimate way to convert a sculpted mesh into a commercially useable geometry. Blender has some really good retopology addons, but I personally love 3dCoat for doing that type of work. You can go directly to PBR texture baking and painting from your retopo work. No round trips in and out of other packages. Blender can do that too all on its own, but I just really love the way 3dCoat handles that stuff.

Topogun or 3D coat (manual) .

Zbrush or 3D coat...maybe, for auto (cause a auto default unwrap with no settings changed zbrush retains more details but 3D coat puts out a "lower poly" game ready mesh on a default auto unwrap which is easier to work on or tweak inside of your favorite modeling suite. With you setting things up in 3D coat before the auto unwrap..3D coat all day.

Blender retopo if I wanted to go 100% free using a sculpt out from zbrush core (well not free but it came for free with a backup little tablet I purchased for traveling)

Or just Blender and the paid plugin mentioned.

Zbrush Core Mini is not for anyone trying to create anything for usage in the programs we use. Or any programs where you need the obj.

More geared towards the person who wants to see more or less how digital sculpting (just sculpting..without all the brush choices ) is inside of Zbrush without paying for the full or core versions.

I guess like sculptris , but at least you could export the obj in sculptris if need be.