Zbrush alternatives?

So apparently this is the "industry standard"...iv been trying to work with it for the past 3 days...the UI and just the navigation and quirks of it are so annoying that in addition to tearing out my hair iv been looking at alternatives..I hear of sculptris and possibly others..

Im looking for something that will be 80 or 90% of the functionality of zbrush, but not designed by monkeys. (free is a plus, but if its the right tool I wont mind paying some cash)

By now usually I get things going, learning a new tool/software/language, the ball gets rolling etc but this thing is just horribly designed. Which would OK if it were free, but I dont want to pay money for a poorly designed tool. (I have a list as long as my leg of things that really annoy me about it)

Sorry for the venting.

Thanks

 

question :
do you want to work in the industry where sculpting is part of your job ? and i mean for a studio, not as a solo indie

if yes, then you better try again at learning zbrush. its the industry standard.

if not you could try sculptris, but its very basic and does not have nearly as much features as zbrush.
then there mudbox, which gets used by some professionals, but isn't nearly as widely spread.
you can also try 3dCoat, which usually only gets picked up for retopo and texture painting, but it also has sculpting features.
then there's the free alternative, blender. sculpting works fine and a big advantage is that you can use it for traditional modeling and sculpt at the same time, without exporting to a different program.

after that there are several smaller, or more unknown programs.

 

I agree that ZBrush takes some time to learn and adjust to, but it is an amazing package that can do almost "too much". My stumbling block w/ it has been adequate displacement maps for use in Maya. You could look into Mudbox or the latest sculpting options in Maya 2018.

 

Blender has a sculpt mode that is quite powerful?

 

it does not have all the utility zbrush has, but it gets things done

but beeing able to use all other modeling tools at the same time is quite powerful

 

Should you hate polygons, 3DCoat's voxel sculpting is really enjoyable. Dunno if the aforementioned software has that

 

Join the club - we have hats and everything!

For industry standard, I don't know of any team who would not hire a great artist due to there lack of zbrush experience. As the software output is the same regardless of which sculpting package used. The only time this would be an issues is if the team had in house tools that plugged into a certain package.

I've been a strong proponent for Mudbox for years due to it's simplicity of use and lovely photoshop like detail layer based approach. For $10/month - it's a steal.

I also concur with SnowInChinas assessment with 3D Coat which I recently picked up at a great discount, and so far after learning the workflow, have very little complaints. I still prefer Mudbox for just straight ease of use but 3DCoat is a great app for the points mentioned by Soul-Challenger.

 

You're almost correct.
Zbrush is one of the top, 3d sculpting software used by the gaming industry.

But some people in the gaming industry, prefer the other 3d sculpting software
for their work. Because those software, either suit their style, is easier
for them to use, has an easy to use gui interface, or has what they're looking for.

There are some good free ones, out there though.
Checkout a cool free one called Sculptris.

 

Mudbox is like £12 a month for full version and can even do the dynamesh thing now.

 

This is my first ever sculpt, made in Sculptris (a long time before Pixologic bought DrPetter).

Easy to use and free, highly recommended!
You will spend very little time learning it... so if you move to other software, it wont be a waste of time.

 

Wow! That is really good work.
How many polys/tris, is the entire thing made up of?

 

Lots, it was a test to see if i can sculpt It can be retopologized if its ever going to a game... also Sculptris has a 'Reduce brush' and 'Reduce Selected' which decimates the mesh in real time.