Blender 3.5 vs Zbrush 2023 | High Poly Performance

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Today we are doing some high poly count sculpting comparisons!
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Check Out My Maya Channel Here:

[ilkhomyuldashev]

I choose Blender over Zbrush only for 1 reason.. the reason is: I dont buy ZBrush Plan yet

But maybe after 3 5 years Blender will be the same as ZBrush in polys

[aleph-tav]

It's not the tool - it's the artis and skillset you develop. Don't get caught in this rat race, focus on developing your skill with the tool you can afford and want to use.

[koraysatiroglu]

For those who wonder, its around 15mil in 3DCoat (both voxel and surface) where I can go up to 25 mil in Blender.

[Jackripster]

Clay strips at 25m faces with 2% spacing is a bit laggy for me on Blender going super fast, but for what i consider a normal pace its fine. Other brushes were smooth.

[joebuehrer]

I just ran the same test on my Mac Mini with the 1st gen Apple Silicone. At 12 mil polys Blender was still running pretty smooth. I don't use the clay brush hardly ever so that didn't bother me. All my other brushes still ran great. At 50 mil it was still running pretty okay but still struggled most of the time.

[HAWXLEADER]

One thing I noticed that is really critical!
Blender might have lagged at 25 mil but it completed the stroke, In ZBrush it looks like the old blender where it would skip to where the mouse pointer was in each rendering frame.
The circle is not round in zbrush XD.
Otherwise yeah zbrush is faster, as a dedicated tool should be!

[zedeon]

Have u tried applying the multires and then adding it again? In my experience the higher subdivision level the laggier it get, so base mesh with 1m poly with 2 subdivision perform better than 1k poly with 7 level of subdivision, u could always rebuild (reconstruct) the subdivision

[abdulkhalilsalik]

Great comparison! One thing you may have forgotten is to check the RAM usage in the task manager.

[joshhockey]

I don't currently do scultping in Blender other than as a way to tweak meshes, so I don't have the experience to say much. Just experimenting with a sphere of 25.16 million faces I noticed it slams well past 16gb of RAM and thrashes the disk really hard. We really shouldn't be using less than 32GB of RAM anymore if we have the option, and it looks like you need 64GB to to sculpt at 25 million comfortably.
That's not going to be the full story of course, CPU and GPU will make a big difference, but it's easy to see that RAM is the first major hurdle.

[githxrm]

The problem here is that you're using multires. With regards to sculpting, it's just the worst. You're automatically going to take a performance and memory hit before you even lay down your first strokes. Blender's implementation of multires still needs massive optimization.

That said, you CAN get much higher poly counts in Blender and produce far more detailed sculpts if you remember the following things.

1. Hardware is always going to be your biggest bottleneck. More RAM and a faster CPU/GPU combo can make all the difference. ZBrush is more scalable because the 2.5D pixol is designed to be less hardware dependent. You can own a potato PC and still get results with multi-million poly counts. Other non-MAXON sculpting apps demand more memory and computational power since they're representationally 100% 3D.

For my part, using Blender alone, I can get it up to about 50mil triangles comfortably. After that, it becomes too slow to work with. (I'm using a 13900k i9 and a RTX 4080 with 64GB). On my older i9-7920x with a 1080ti, I could do about 25mil triangles.

2. Bypass multi-res altogether. It's helpful, but too slow to be practical under certain circumstances. Using strict subdivision or dyntopo will always yield better performance and/or apparent results.

3. Subdivide only as necessary. That's just a common sense tip, if a bit old school. Until you've squeezed out every last drop from your current SDS level, do not move up one more.

4. Don't start from a single sphere or cube. Yes. It's good for certain things like heads, but it's not the smartest approach. Blocking out your character with simple booleaned primitives is more efficient. It will yield better results overall since you can weed out silhouette issues early on. Blocking also Lets you visualize your model more clearly and add crucial details before you even drop in a single stroke of sculpted detail. Sculpting can be used to block in a form, but it's always more efficiently applied for adding in detail once you already have that blocked out base in place first.

5. Use dyntopo instead. Multires is slow, but strict (Catmull Clark) subdivision is inefficient. How often to you sculpt in tons of detail to the back of a head compared to the front? Strictly subdividing, you're adding in detail uniformly - even to places where it's useless. Using dyntopo, you're only adding detail where you need it and when.

6. Rough, retopo, and THEN add detail. If you're not going to use blocking techniques, this is a key strategy. Helpful even if you are. Compare this to 2D art. If the rough or block out is your "scribble" then the early stage retopo you giving that scribble a more definite form from which to add further detail. That early stage retopo will have better defined topology which, in turn, gives you the ability to add detail appropriately, more evenly, and with less surface rippling.

7. Invest a few buck and buy Exoside QuadRemesher. Seriously. Native remeshing is okay, but slow and not always as efficient as you will want. Voxel remeshing has its place, but your results will vary. Too low of a resolution and you miss crucial details. Too high and you add detail where you don't need it. Plus, your topology will be grid-based instead of having a proper edge flow.

3rd party remeshing addons on Blender Market or Gumroad are okay-ish too, but Exoside's QuadRemesher is 100% going to be your best option. Created by one of the co-developers of ZBrush's own ZRemesher, you know exactly what to expect. Fast, efficient, and produces some amazing results.

8. Interoperability isn't a dirty word. Yes. The point here is to see if you can use Blender to replace ZBrush. However, IRL, the best path might be the one where multiple apps coexist side-by-side. If you can GoZ or GoB from Blender to ZBrush or 3DCoat, respectively, then don't overlook that option. There will certainly be things that you can do in Blender far easier than either of those too apps. Likewise, those apps will have strengths that Blender won't. If all that you have is just Blender then that's fine. However, if you have the resources then don't overlook the power available by maximizing the tools in your toolbox. It's no different than starting a texture in Substance/3DC and bouncing back and forth to/from Photoshop.

9. Use references. Sounds obvious, but having a starting point can help you pick out key areas of detail early on. Free form sculpting has its limits. A failure to plan is a plan for failure. You'll get more apparent detail out a mesh that's planned than one that's simply put together in the moment.

10. Detail isn't always about poly count. We always talk about high poly count sculpting as if it has something to do with detail. That's probably the wrong way to think about it. Put those extra polygons to use there they matter. If it changes the silhouette or improves deformation in any way, that's where your poly detail should go. If your only reason for adding extra polys is so that you can add in surface details like skin pores, well, there are other/better ways to do that. Surface details such as skin pores won't affect the silhouette or the ability of that mesh to deform, animate. Map-based detail is more efficient.

11. How much detail do you REALLY need? Just because I can sculpt in 3DCoat with 400mil polys or ZBrush with 1bil doesn't mean that I even need a fraction of that detail irl. Practically, that's the sort of detail that you will end up retopoing down or dumping out to a map when performance is key. You're ALWAYS going to optimize - especially if you work with game models, but even for films. When was the last time you saw a game character with 400mil polys?

Even pre-rendering with a render farm, there's no such thing as unlimited detail. The detail you think that you see is more important than the detail actually in that mesh. Anybody who's seen meshes coming out of game studios or animation houses like Pixar knows the value of optimization and doing more with less; No person viewing your model or playing your game will care if you have true poly pores.

IRL, you need fewer polys than you think that you do. What you want is the ability to use more polys, but the restraint to use do more with less. Blender is up to snuff for production work. Easily.

Even with a slower PC, you can still get great performance out of Blender. It all comes down to strategy.

[janvollgod]

Zbrush use another method to calculate point in space. Blender stores the object as is, full data. Zbrush just the freakin picture of it hahaha..funny but true. As i said so often, for stylize stuff, you will never need Zbrush, but concept, models for vector painting, high detail, i go with zbrush with no problems up 60 Millions, everything smooth with 7950x Ryzen. Zbrush use cpu only, while Blender use GPU. The good thing, zbrush runs on notebook with shit gpu, but good cpu, very well, if you have at least 16 gig of ram. I was curious to try it out on the surface laptop of my wife. Fast intel cpu rocks, while intel gfx, good enough for minecraft.
The question is, do you need such high detail on a physical surface. You can do very high detail with 500k and then bake the hell out of it in substance painter. Saw last week a dragon from a friend, could not believe this thing was under 500k polys.
Anyway.. thanks for the honest comparison.

[mr.j]

Will Zbrush release a beta that features a completely easy and modern UI? I think they should as it will generate more revenue especially for beginners. While still keeping the old UI for people who are already used to using it.

[matsy]

will there finally be significant improvements in blender 4.0?🤷‍♂

[KhurramShahzad-idqy]

Fun fact, blender is true 3D while zbrush is 2.5D ish software, and you can do everything (model, sculpt, texture, rig, animate, simulate, light and render etc.) in blender and only sculpt in zbrush, what it is for so there is that. Good comparison though.

[glenfoxh]

This is the most amazing thing about ZBrush and it's speed. It is CPU based. No GPU acceleration. And yet, faster than most anything out there, even with GPU acceleration used with them.

[ProjectAtlasmodling]

The real question should not be how many pollys the software can do but how many you actually need

[konradgergely]

Hi mate, you are mentioning "this is my setup" which I would like to compare to my PC. Can you please go in details? At least gpu cpu ram? Thx

[FlowerPower]

Push no limit of quality your art) Now you understand why Zbrush the best))

[monkeytheory]

Blender is great. But when sculpting. This is the reason why I transferred to zbrush.

[jamesgtmoore]

Nice comparison but I don't feel the need to go above 1 million polygons in Blender for my sculpts as there seems to be enough polys at this level for tiny details such as skin pores. I'm not a AAA artist though.