Ever Had a Bologna and Potato Chip Sandwich?

I started a new class this semester dealing in digital sculpting using a new program called Zbrush. It's a lot like Modo or Mudbox, if anyone has ever used that. Basically, it lets you paint in the 3D almost. It's like molding a ball of clay on the computer. I thought I'd post my first projects, which were to make a couple of alien seeds.

Due to the nature of how you work with this program, it's very easy to create very natural looking organic shapes. I haven't experimented much with non-organics but it's probably a much more complicated matter. There are many different "brushes" to choose from, and though the layout of the tools at your disposal is kind of unintuitive, it's not hard to at least remember where everything is. There are sliders for just about any option you could think of, and many that you wouldn't and probably never will.

Having worked with Maya rather a lot, one of the things I was most impressed by in this program was the paint tools. Painting in Maya is a huge drag, since you have to work with UVs, which are never very fun. Though you can paint directly on objects it's a sort of touch and go thing you don't really want to mess with in any incredible amount of detail. However, using Zbrush, you're given a large variety of options and brushes. You may have to go over the areas more than once when you paint over the wrong bits by accident, and if the area that you are painting is too thin you often face the problem of painting both sides of a plane. But if you come at it with a good amount of creativity, you can come through with a very nice looking object.

I do have a couple gripes, which I mostly can't talk about but am assured they're being worked on. But overall, as a 3D digital artist I really enjoy this program. It's incredibly satisfying to be able to just pick up something like this and come out after one or two tries with something that looks pretty amazing. It didn't even take that much time to do. A few hours on each. Even nicer is that I can lower the resolution and import these into Maya to be animated or whatever, and vice versa I can import a Maya object into this and work better details into it.

Overall I will quite enjoy using this (or something like it, I've never actually used Modo or Mudbox, but would be interested in trying either. I'll make sure to upload anything I make, we're trying to make faces next which should be an interesting challenge.