Autodesk Mudbox 2009 :: Software Review

[Reepoman]

Mudbox is great no doubt about it. Thanks for the review! :applause:

[oglu]

nice read... thanks...

[Stellios]

This back and forth marketing battle of the sculpting apps is quite amusing :P

Nice review however.

[cresshead]

i wonder what graphics card he used on that review of mudbox 2009

[DDS]

Well since Pixologic is one of the few companies that resists switching to Autodesk dark side....it makes the battle quite Epic, such as resistance against the empire. Really exciting!

That said I think Mudbox is turning into a beautiful app :)

[oglu]

i wonder what graphics card he used on that review of mudbox 2009

all cards with a 8800 chip or greater working like a dream...
geforce 250, quadro 3700,...

[PaulAdams]

all cards with a 8800 chip or greater working like a dream...
geforce 250, quadro 3700,...

Tell that to my 280GTX which can't handle more than 6mill in Mudbox.

Bit strange for a review of something that came out months ago.

[oglu]

thats really strange...
up to 30mio quads and more are no problem with my old 8800gt...

[Briareos]

Most reviews would outline pros and cons.. but apparently mudbox is 100% perfect! wow!

[cresshead]

whilst it's a nice read it doesn't come across as a review..more like a user experience on mudbox...not sure if his review is for the windows or mac version...no detials on computer used for the 'review' like ram installed, video card and o/s..

more actual details would turn it into a typical review..it's an important aspect to users on sculpting apps that they should know what graphics cards are used for open gl/direct x viewport driven apps like mudbox, 3dcoat and the installed ram holding the scenes also what screen res they're sculpting at as i've read that mudbox is dependant on decent cards [pro] and drivers unlike software acceleration that say zbrush uses which need no pro cards just bags of system ram.

i surpose the best thing to do is have a play an see how mudbox2009 performs on my acer laptop which has a 8600GT card [256ram] compared to my zbrush3.1

then try it on my h.p. tablet pc..then my deskside workstation [quadcore]

i'll d/l the demo this weekend

[cresshead]

Tell that to my 280GTX which can't handle more than 6mill in Mudbox.

Bit strange for a review of something that came out months ago.

he maybe reviewing the osx version that came out last week which would make sense but he's not mentioned what o/s the review is from.

[PaulHellard]

I'll be updating the review in the next few hours with information from Stephen. We will gather those details you requested.

[cresshead]

cool, looking forward to some of those details...
i'm downloading the demo version of mudbox2009 today.

[vlad74]

i surpose the best thing to do is have a play an see how mudbox2009 performs on my acer laptop which has a 8600GT card [256ram] compared to my zbrush3.1

then try it on my h.p. tablet pc..then my deskside workstation [quadcore]

i'll d/l the demo this weekend

You wont regret it. I am sure about that. :)

[esprite]

I really enjoy using Mudbox even though I'm a noob. Getting used to using it and being able to create work that is actually working (I mean I can use it for something and it doesn't look horrible.) has been much faster compared to trying to get up to a similar level of ability in zbrush.

I <3 Mudbox.

[Stellios]

whilst it's a nice read it doesn't come across as a review..




Most reviews would outline pros and cons.. but apparently mudbox is 100% perfect! wow!

That's because its more of an advertisement.

[MattDubs]

Most reviews would outline pros and cons.. but apparently mudbox is 100% perfect! wow!

That was sort of the sentiment I was thinking as I read. What are its shortcomings and how does it make up for those?

[Stinkfist]

Mudbox is just pure function and usability. I switched from zbrush a year ago and my only regret is that I didnt do it sooner. But yeah, these 'reviews' are complete rubbish.


Tell that to my 280GTX which can't handle more than 6mill in Mudbox

I have a GTX260 and I can pull +30 million in Vista64 with 4Gb of ram.

[PaulAdams]

Mudbox is just pure function and usability. I switched from zbrush a year ago and my only regret is that I didnt do it sooner. But yeah, these 'reviews' are complete rubbish.


I have a GTX260 and I can pull +30 million in Vista64 with 4Gb of ram.

Well hot damn. I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong then as I'm running Vista64 with 280GTX, 6GB RAM, Core i7 920 and it chugs along at 7fps on a 6mill mesh. I get great benchmarking in everything other than Mudbox 2009.

[Andy1010]

I think CG Society should stay away from doing reviews on products. Almost every review that I've read from you guys seems to be a promotional piece for what you want to plug. Do you guys get a kick back from Autodesk for doing this? It really grinds me that you guys feed us this PR crap that obviously is not a review but a promotion of a piece of software.

[Darksharp177]

I agree with Andy, the review comes off as a promotional piece. The software is not even close to perfect. A good review will typically have pros and cons.

While I love alot of things about the new Mudbox, I am really not a fan of it's selection capabilities. I find it EXTREMELY clunky and unintuitive.

Here's how you select:
"Go into face selection mode (or use the V hotkey for fast face selection)
Drag from outside your model while holding down the left and middle mouse buttons at the same time then release once your selection is made.
This will rectangle select and include back faces as well."

Thread on it here: http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/23607/


Also MB's sculpting does not feel as "claylike" as ZBrushes.

That being said, I love how easy it is to just jump into MB. Nice UI.

[patient09]

going to find out for myself what the pros and cons are by downloading demo.

probably the best way to go about it. ;)

thanks for the review.

[ambient-whisper]

That was sort of the sentiment I was thinking as I read. What are its shortcomings and how does it make up for those?

last time i used mudbox was the trial of 2009 before sp1, so just remember this..


heres the cons. ( people keep giving pros without cons, so i will just focus on cons )

paint engine:
lack of good paint tools. the paint tools are very very basic. its at about the same level of modo. it lacks a good paint brush engine ( theres none to speak of really, except being able to set your spacing, colour, image that you want to use to paint with, etc. but no advanced options at all, like painting with an overlay effect, or having your size jitter a certain amount on X, or Y, or have the scale jitter, and also make this based on pressure. none of this stuff is possible at the level you would want from a strong application. dodge, burn, blur, smear were all missing as far as i could remember. in the state i used mud, it was just good for laying down a basic coat of pain, but not much more. the lack of blending modes and effects makes sure that you cant for example layer your textures to do effects like rusting, where the border of the image where the alpha is applied to would take on a certain colour with some fading. i wasnt expecting this for its first version of the paint engine, but it would have been a nice touch. the blur/smear, etc brushed i was actually expecting since those are very basic tools that every paint tool needs.

it uses videocard ram for textures ( i dont know how sp1+ deals with this, but if you wanted to use a large texture as your reference, and you wanted to paint a large texture you would run out of ram almost immediately, and you would get a blank texture as your result.

mudbox works very bad with models that have ngons, so make sure you have clean models. you can import a model with 30k polygons that consists of a lot of ngons and it will import 20x longer than a model that is all quads but is 700k polys. it seems to get confused somewhere and stalls until it gets tired and gives you the object to work on.

if the model is all quads it will work very very fast. ive worked up to 30 million and it was smooth.

the smooth brush is slow at larger polycounts. really really really slow, unless your cursor is very tiny or you zoom way in. up until 8 million its really fast.

i actually prefer baking in zbrush. mudbox gives you more options but even while following a tutorial, for some reason the results i was getting out of mud werent what i was expecting. i was probably doing something wrong, or the tutorial omitted some piece of information but with zbrush you just press adaptive, choose texture size and let it rip. its never failed me till now.

going between subdivisions is faster in zbrush, so you tend to switch more often.

lack of plugins is also huge.

lack of transpose type stuff.

in viewport fx sorta sucked ( in the original 2009 version ). the AO was horrible, and the depth of field was much too strong and just looked ugly. im sure its gotten better since ( at least i hope so.

price is more than it should be at this point in time. once it becomes a bit of a fuller product, i will understand, but i think its too steep, when the competition does offer a lot more for less. ( both 3d coat and zbrush )

mudbox is only simple for now because its still rather limited. as soon as it becomes a larger product, it will face the same issues that every application faces. where do we put this, or that, and how do we make it more present/ more intuitive.


i will repeat, its not a bash, but just a reality check that its still a young product that is still making its first baby steps.

so for those that wanted to know in which areas it could be criticized in, there ya go.

[Roger Eberhart]

Most reviews would outline pros and cons.. but apparently mudbox is 100% perfect! wow!

Not quite. As of SP2, it still can't handle mirrored UV seams. That makes the texture painting less than ideal for game artists that mirror parts of the mesh to save texture space. Hopefully SP3 will address this.

[oglu]

where is the problem with mirrored uvs..?
no problems here... i move the mirrored uvs to the second tile...

[BitsAndBytes]

Yes, 'review' is a bit of a joke as this could be referenced as 'advertorial' in the dictionary. Anyway, while Mudbox 2009's paint tools underwhelmed me it was likely because I had already made up my mind that it would really define texture painting once and for all. It didn't quite live up to that (yet) but it's still good I think. My main gripe sofar is the crappy flat-shade rendering. I know Kolby Jukes refused to use Mudbox 2009 for this very reason and that Skymatter promised to fix it in an upcoming service pack (likely sp3?), yay finally!

Bottom line is that both Mudbox and ZBrush have bugs and only the fanboys of each faction will try to paint their preferred application as bugfree and the other(s) as bugridden.

[DanielWray]

I must be doing something wrong as well with my setup;

Quadcore 2.4GHz
3GB DDR2 800MHz
8800GTS 320MB

it start's to lag at 2 million polygons, the limit is the same with blenders sculping software. I hear people saying they can push 30 million polygons, there computers may be faster but surely i should be able to push more than 2 million polygons.

Anyway i'm running the 09 demo of mudbox and it's a pretty nice software package, really simple to use, amazing interface (well for a sculpting tool). I agree with a previous post that it doesn't feel like Zbrush, i'd actaully say it feel's more like blender to be honest. Some may disagree. Anyway i'm finding it much easier to get into than Zbrush but i think that's becuase the concept is still the same as other 3D apps, you have your 3D model and you modify it in a 3D viewport.

I'm off to read the review now.

[BColbourn]

most of the features work well enough on my ati x1950 card, which isnt even supported by ati anymore =O so thats good new for mudbox.

also, just tried it on a mac and it ran fairly well, the realtime AO took a huge performance hit, as did the DOF but those are just eye candy so its ok, the modeling and painting handled just fine. with tonemapping, DOF and AO on with a 200k model i was able to sculpt and paint at about 8fps, with the features off it was running a solid 40fps. specs are a 2007 macbook pro with ati x1600 gfx card.

[SheepFactory]

It runs great on the pos ATI card in my 3 years old macbook pro.

[oglu]

interesting... with a 3gig rig 8mio should be no problem...
in your case the ram limits the polycount... but the speed should be smooth...

as you can see im able to sculpt 70mio on high framerates...



http://www.mc-rolling-skulls.at/oglu/70mio.jpg

[anoon]

How much is a new seat?
How much for an upgrade from 1.0?
How much is the subscription plan going to cost me?

[oglu]

take a look anoon...
https://autodesk.plimus.com/buymb2009.html

[ambient-whisper]

i wonder if the problem is because the user is using a 32bit windows or not. maybe the difference is that we might be using a 64bit os and thats why we can sculpt at much higher levels.?!

i got a quad core 2.8 ( which wouldnt make THAT much of a difference from a quad core 2.4 ) 8gb ram and a geforce 8800. i didnt bother taking mud above 30 mil because i felt that i wouldnt need to go higher ( and it would take longer to bake, subd/unsubd, and smooth brush performance would go down the gutter ). 30 mil is sort of a safe "limit"

it could also be drivers. i always make sure to read up user reviews before upgrading drivers.

[rcronin]

Mudbox=truly cool. I just set up my intuos4 for it. pen buttons for brush size and navigation, side buttons alt, undo, shift, ctrl. I dig it.
I'm living in a fantasy world but wouldn't it be cool to export a maya scene from mudbox, have it come into Maya looking like MB. (perhaps a base model with the disp map/subdiv approx applied and an opengl preview of it) with 2 sliders, amount of disp and quality....press render - boom done? ahhh fantasy.

[macmayaguy]

Mudbox=truly cool. I just set up my intuos4 for it. pen buttons for brush size and navigation, side buttons alt, undo, shift, ctrl. I dig it.
I'm living in a fantasy world but wouldn't it be cool to export a maya scene from mudbox, have it come into Maya looking like MB. (perhaps a base model with the disp map/subdiv approx applied and an opengl preview of it) with 2 sliders, amount of disp and quality....press render - boom done? ahhh fantasy.

Dude, that's just crazy talk ;-)

[DarthWayne]

last time i used mudbox was the trial of 2009 before sp1, so just remember this..


heres the cons. ( people keep giving pros without cons, so i will just focus on cons )

Coming from a well known Zbrush user that very even handed of you Martin lol. :)


paint engine:
lack of good paint tools. the paint tools are very very basic. its at about the same level of modo. it lacks a good paint brush engine ( theres none to speak of really, except being able to set your spacing, colour, image that you want to use to paint with, etc. but no advanced options at all, like painting with an overlay effect, or having your size jitter a certain amount on X, or Y, or have the scale jitter, and also make this based on pressure. none of this stuff is possible at the level you would want from a strong application. dodge, burn, blur, smear were all missing as far as i could remember. in the state i used mud, it was just good for laying down a basic coat of pain, but not much more. the lack of blending modes and effects makes sure that you cant for example layer your textures to do effects like rusting, where the border of the image where the alpha is applied to would take on a certain colour with some fading. i wasnt expecting this for its first version of the paint engine, but it would have been a nice touch. the blur/smear, etc brushed i was actually expecting since those are very basic tools that every paint tool needs.


some fair points, but does an oil painter have 'blend modes'? So I'd hardly say texturing is nearly impossible... I like to think a lot of mine from mud2k9 stand up rather well, as do a few other users I can think of. ;) Smooth would be nice, but I for once prefer my textures to fade out natrualy rather than simply smoothing 2 or more colours together.



it uses videocard ram for textures ( i dont know how sp1+ deals with this, but if you wanted to use a large texture as your reference, and you wanted to paint a large texture you would run out of ram almost immediately, and you would get a blank texture as your result.


Wrong

Mudbox 2009 Also manages the textures in a special way so they dont use ram per map.


Since the ervice packs you can now load and unload texture sets on the fly (this is done by the magic mudbox texture pixies). As a result you can work with more layer than your going to need. Now chances are that 99.99% of the time if your doing the detail work on a texture tile for one part of a character or envirment you are going to be working in isolation for that part anyway... need 2d uv tiles with 25 texture layers in your diffuse channle for example..no problem..and no I dont run a pro card like a quadro but a 9800 gt lol.

mudbox works very bad with models that have ngons, so make sure you have clean models. you can import a model with 30k polygons that consists of a lot of ngons and it will import 20x longer than a model that is all quads but is 700k polys. it seems to get confused somewhere and stalls until it gets tired and gives you the object to work on.

I've never had this issue on meshes containing tris..... as a test I scupted one character that had a base continaing about 500 of the buggers and it was seamless.... But yes tris are less than ideal as they are in Zbrush.

if the model is all quads it will work very very fast. ive worked up to 30 million and it was smooth.

OK top tip time:

Go to your prefs and change PreProcession on load to '1' and reboot.

My record just to see how far my quad core with 8 gig could go? 130 million

I may still have the test vid somewhere....


the smooth brush is slow at larger polycounts. really really really slow, unless your cursor is very tiny or you zoom way in. up until 8 million its really fast.

Surely good pratice is to smooth large detail at lower levels and step up? But hey maybe I'm dillusional lol...

i actually prefer baking in zbrush. mudbox gives you more options but even while following a tutorial, for some reason the results i was getting out of mud werent what i was expecting. i was probably doing something wrong, or the tutorial omitted some piece of information but with zbrush you just press adaptive, choose texture size and let it rip. its never failed me till now.

It should be a fairly simple 'easy as falling off a log' process to be honest. to go disp map panel...select model and source model... select size and place and export format and hit go......


going between subdivisions is faster in zbrush, so you tend to switch more often.

I think that depends on the way you sculpt and we all have differnt styles, but I can't say I've had any compaints about the stepping up and down levels in either app to be fair.

lack of plugins is also huge.

Why? The SDK is in dev and will see the light of day but I am very interested what exactly you feel a plugin would be needed to do. I'm sure a lot of things will 'arrive' once the sdk is in the hands of users.



lack of transpose type stuff.

Agreed...although I usually rig in max or maya anyway so its no biggy to me. Although lets face it zbrush transpose is hardly a pefect solution and really is as rough as a donkeys backside.... so give me a proper rig any day.

in viewport fx sorta sucked ( in the original 2009 version ). the AO was horrible, and the depth of field was much too strong and just looked ugly. im sure its gotten better since ( at least i hope so.

Those were fixed back in sp1

price is more than it should be at this point in time. once it becomes a bit of a fuller product, i will understand, but i think its too steep, when the competition does offer a lot more for less. ( both 3d coat and zbrush )

Horses for courses really although I dont see the ability to paint and view all your texture channles in zb....... or the abilyt to view in real time an on target version of your low res for game guys..or a list of others things I could fill this with.
3d coat is a promissing app but way too raw right now.

mudbox is only simple for now because its still rather limited. as soon as it becomes a larger product, it will face the same issues that every application faces. where do we put this, or that, and how do we make it more present/ more intuitive.

Luckily I had the future plans for mud outlined to me in detail some time back and I can say thats not going to be a problem.... Things such as that are very well planned.


i will repeat, its not a bash, but just a reality check that its still a young product that is still making its first baby steps.

so for those that wanted to know in which areas it could be criticized in, there ya go.


Hopefully you wont see this as a bash either martin... Hopefully it makes a point.

In a way as I've always said ask 50 artists their opinions of both apps and you'll get 50 lots of vastly varying opinions ranging for truthful to downright lies, via midstaken-ville The only true way is to give each app a try out with no preconceptions and see which that artist likes.

My advice to users of EITHER APP is not to belive what any person gives as their opinion but rather to make their own mind up.

I find it humorous that users critisise this review for being 100% positive when back when zbrush 3's reviews were apprached in exactly the same way it was all 'wow, l33t' 'dude thats amazing' etc etc et clol. A large helping of double standards anyone? lol :D:D

The quickest way to get 80% of people here to moan about a thing is to put the word 'Autodesk ' in front of it...So I now proudly announce Autodesk 'AIR' so I now await the baited breath from users who refuse to breathe Autodesk air lol.

This is software not religion or team sports...its a hammer or a chisel..not the meaning of life the universe and everything.

Wayne...

[DarthWayne]

Mudbox=truly cool. I just set up my intuos4 for it. pen buttons for brush size and navigation, side buttons alt, undo, shift, ctrl. I dig it.
I'm living in a fantasy world but wouldn't it be cool to export a maya scene from mudbox, have it come into Maya looking like MB. (perhaps a base model with the disp map/subdiv approx applied and an opengl preview of it) with 2 sliders, amount of disp and quality....press render - boom done? ahhh fantasy.


Yes that would be nice wouldn't it ;) (dum de dum de dum.....)

Not quite. As of SP2, it still can't handle mirrored UV seams. That makes the texture painting less than ideal for game artists that mirror parts of the mesh to save texture space. Hopefully SP3 will address this.

Yes it can..I did an vid on it ages back it's over on MudboxHub (http://www.mudboxhub.com) amongst the QuickStart ones.... Mirroed UV's were one of the 1st tings I tested back in the beta as it was such an important thing to get right for guys working in games.


Wayne...

[ambient-whisper]

long post below beware :D

Agreed...although I usually rig in max or maya anyway so its no biggy to me. Although lets face it zbrush transpose is hardly a pefect solution and really is as rough as a donkeys backside.... so give me a proper rig any day.

transpose: its not a perfect solution but its nice to have for sure used it more than once to repose meshes, to re-purpose characters from one job to another quickly. sometimes rigging just isnt enough ( and sometimes too time costly when you could just use the quick alpha tool thingy that comes with transpose. however sometimes it does have its quirks unfortunately, and often breaks with symmetry, but that is an easy fix. lets just say this, transpose has its faults, but i am glad its there because i would rather have the current version than none at all :D


Horses for courses really although I dont see the ability to paint and view all your texture channles in zb....... or the abilyt to view in real time an on target version of your low res for game guys..or a list of others things I could fill this with.
3d coat is a promissing app but way too raw right now.

yeah, this one is sorta shaky. nobody really does a great job in this area. funny enough, deep paint 3d is probably the best solution when it comes to painting on multiple channels at the same time with one brush stroke ( where the brush has different textures for bump, colour, etc ).




the lack of plugins is huge because you have no plugins to do things like the normal mapper with the ability to change settings, apply sharpening, blurring, inflate before writing out the normal maps, or previewing how it will look partially to a model so that you can speed up the tweaking process., or zapplink which has more use than just linking to external editors ( such as saving out different sides of a model so you can apply a paint job onto different sides of a model at the same time. ), texture managers, etc. i personally dont care for the current method of handling texture references in mudbox. once the library gets big its not fun to manage textures. its not great in zbrush either, imo, but plugins do help out more than just a little bit.



Surely good pratice is to smooth large detail at lower levels and step up?



nono, you got it right, and i do it the same way, but it is a crit non the less. however it would still have been nice to see some sort of optimization to make smooth brush...smoother at larger polycounts. im sure you would agree because who wouldnt welcome faster tools ? ;)




It should be a fairly simple 'easy as falling off a log' process to be honest. to go disp map panel...select model and source model... select size and place and export format and hit go......



did just that and yeah, for some reason i wasnt getting results i wanted. still not sure why, but it doesnt matter now :). i was merely testing way back to see how the app behaved compared to version 1. i liked 2 a hell of a lot more. its a much smoother ride for sure.





Wrong

not really, pre sp1 handling of textures was poor, and thats why the fix was issued in sp1. i just said that i didnt test sp1 so i couldnt say much about its handling post sp1. until i see it in action or play with it, marketing doesnt do much for me.

but does an oil painter have 'blend modes'?

nope he doesnt, but then again, an oil painter has to wait for his paint to dry before he can apply another layer. the tools are different, and one would expect to get a certain toolset with today's paint tools. currently the paint tools are raw, basic and thats it. of course they are workable, but ive seen some great stuff done in both MS paint and gimp, but i wouldnt call them great paint applications ;). i dont think you would object for autodesk to add more paint tools to mud, and im sure youd love to have extra flexibility while at it. some basic tools are needed to give us this flexibility. what if for example i want to apply a layer of a texture as a base colour set, blur it and then paint some other colours onto that blurred/smudged result?. its not all about blending, but giving us options to do things the way we want, or need.



btw. ngons are an issue. i never really had an issue in mud with tris. but it seems to be a per object type thing.



anyhow, me using zbrush has nothing to do with my post/s. i dont have loyalty to a product ( they are just tools after all. ) i just needed to balance the thread out a bit.

i didnt care for 1.07. it felt much slower than i would like, and limiting in many ways. 2.0 is a huge improvement, and i really like some of the new brushes that were added in. ( knife being one of my favorites to which zbrush has no competition for ( slash is a joke )).




I find it humorous that users critisise this review for being 100% positive when back when zbrush 3's reviews were apprached in exactly the same way it was all 'wow, l33t' 'dude thats amazing' etc etc et clol. A large helping of double standards anyone? lol file:///G:/DOCUME%7E1/ADMINI%7E1/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.giffile:///G:/DOCUME%7E1/ADMINI%7E1/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif

well, not really. i mean people have been bashing zb since its inception about "bad ui", not being like a standard app, etc. to that end, they have ventured out and brought us tools that were experimental, versus mudbox bringing us exactly what we have seen in previous products, and bringing it under one roof. so the things that zb 3.0 did back then i would agree that those things were amazing, as nobody else had given us similar tools.

i've said my part :D been fun.

[webhead]

whilst it's a nice read it doesn't come across as a review..more like a user experience on mudbox...not sure if his review is for the windows or mac version...no detials on computer used for the 'review' like ram installed, video card and o/s.

He actually did give some specifics regarding what system/OS he was using:

"I tried out Mudbox on a couple of Windows boxes and they yielded similar results. One was a Dell desktop system running Windows XP 64-bit with 8GB of RAM and a Quadro FX 4600 Graphix Card with about 800 MB of RAM. The other machine was a new Dell Covet laptop running Windows Vista 64 bit with 8GB of RAM and the Quadro FX 3700 M which has about a GB of onboard RAM."

..."Overall, I was impressed with Autodesk Mudbox 2009, but it is NOT a perfect package. Having been on the market for a while, Mudbox 2009 now has the OS X version in pre-release. The question is, will Mudbox 2009 measure up to ZBrush or modo in the Mac environment."

[SheepFactory]

Mudbox 2009 now has the OS X version in pre-release. The question is, will Mudbox 2009 measure up to ZBrush or modo in the Mac environment.[/i]"


Author has a great sense of humour...

[webhead]

Author has a great sense of humour...

LOL :banghead:

[emeyers]

I've always wondered, why did Autodesk remove the best feature from the flatten brush in 2009? The Update Plane option. It just doesn't make sense

[cresshead]

He actually did give some specifics regarding what system/OS he was using:

"I tried out Mudbox on a couple of Windows boxes and they yielded similar results. One was a Dell desktop system running Windows XP 64-bit with 8GB of RAM and a Quadro FX 4600 Graphix Card with about 800 MB of RAM. The other machine was a new Dell Covet laptop running Windows Vista 64 bit with 8GB of RAM and the Quadro FX 3700 M which has about a GB of onboard RAM."

..."Overall, I was impressed with Autodesk Mudbox 2009, but it is NOT a perfect package. Having been on the market for a while, Mudbox 2009 now has the OS X version in pre-release. The question is, will Mudbox 2009 measure up to ZBrush or modo in the Mac environment."

on release of the article there were no specifics on system specs...i made a post here and got a PM to tell me the article was going to be updated with some info on that..and it has now.

[DarthWayne]

..."Overall, I was impressed with Autodesk Mudbox 2009, but it is NOT a perfect package. Having been on the market for a while, Mudbox 2009 now has the OS X version in pre-release. The question is, will Mudbox 2009 measure up to ZBrush or modo in the Mac environment."

Lol well...

Zb for mac = broke

Mud2k9 for mac = working


Wayne...

[oglu]

and here is the zbrush mac fix... :curious:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=70133

[DarthWayne]

and here is the zbrush mac fix... :curious:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=70133

Dery deary me...they REALLY dont want to lose those mac users do they judging by their responses lol. :D Amazing how it took mud for mac before a fix was announced... I wonder if would have ever arrived without mudmac? ;)

But yet again its probably just some very strange coincidence lol..realy it is...honest....lol

Wayne...

[AJ]

This is software not religion or team sports...its a hammer or a chisel..not the meaning of life the universe and everything.
This is an excellent sentiment Wayne.

Amazing how it took mud for mac before a fix was announced... I wonder if would have ever arrived without mudmac?
However I can't help thinking it's one you could adhere to a little more yourself?

:)

[BitsAndBytes]

Got to go with AJ here, you start to come across like one of them fanboys Wayne. It's beneath you in my opinion.

[DarthWayne]

I'll hold my hands up and admit I can go a bit overboard at times lol..plus ,my sense of humour and irony doesn't always come across. But it does P me off a little when I read how one app can do no wrong and the other can do no right in some eyes... sometimes its nice to equalise things out a bit. But I do think I made a very valid point I made about mud mac's appearance maybe spurring some actual bloody movement for zb mac guys. Do you really think an annoucement now so close to mudmacs demo is a coincidence, or a business tactic?

Wayne...

[BitsAndBytes]

The timing of the announcement is most certainly made to 'steal some thunder', I have no doubt of that. As for Mudbox for OSX speeding up ZB mac bugfixes, well I don't know but I certainly hope so since this is exactly what makes competition such a great thing. No matter what your preference is, if there is atleast two strong competitiors the respective end users will reap the benefits. I hope (and firmly believe) that ZBrush 4 willl make Mudbox 2010 a much better product (and vice versa). But the whole 'this one triggered that' is pointless, would there have been a OSX Mudbox if there hadn't been a OSX ZBrush? Would there even have been a Mudbox if there hadn't been a ZBrush, that discussion leads nowehere in my opinion.

[thablanchh]

The quickest way to get 80% of people here to moan about a thing is to put the word 'Autodesk ' in front of it
gotta love that statement.....

[tonytrout]

He He gotta agree with you, it never ceases to amaze how the shutters go up for some people when Autodesk is mentioned, even though they make all the best 3D software. Any way I am enjoying mudbox and appreciated the review.

BTW. No point grinding on about one app vs another. i use both. I use zbrush for transpose and a couple of other things like turntables but mudbox for sculpting and painting I find is much better

[Steve Green]

I think 'Make' is pushing it a bit.

Mudbox, XSI and Maya were complete apps before Autodesk acquired them.

- Steve

[DanielWray]

Well after some tweaking of my software/ drivers i can push 8 million polygons in mudbox, i'm quite pleased with that.

One thing i've noticed though is that there are alot of bugs in the 09 demo, i get a new bug every time i run the application.

I'm guessing the demo is like a beta build of the software?

[oglu]

daniel have you tried the new SP2 demo..?
should be much more stable...

[DanielWray]

Yep, i'm running SP2, downloaded it the other day from the autodesk website.

It's wierd, it worked fine the first few times then i started to get the bugs. I think i'll just uninstall it, remove all the reg settings and profiles etc and re-install.

[Yuzrass]

My honest opinion is that I been using Zbrush 1st for a long time and when I try mudbox 2009 I thought this is way better since it is more simple and more like traditional 3D apps. But then as I used it I came to realize that I missed Zbrush alot with all it's powerful tools. To me the only advantage mudbox had agaisnt Zbrush is the power of texturing. I can't benefit the 30mill poly as I can't afford a 64bit vista and more ram. Another thing is sculpting in mudbox feels abit off compared to Zbrush natural feeling.

Just my opinion ofcourse.

[Teyon]

I remember when folks asked Martin - I think it was you Martin - Why would you need to go as high as a million polys or some such thing back when Zbrush 2 was released. There was that one image of a monster pig, I'll never forget it...haunts me to this day. Good times. Now we squabble about how many millions we're being denied due to this limitation or that limitation. I'm just glad programs like ZBrush and Mudbox exist so that we can even have that kind of discussion. lol.

I tried getting into Mudbox twice - the first time it kept crashing and the second time, I didn't have time to give it a serious go. Figure if I don't like where Zbrush 4 goes, I'll give Mudbox another try. The article went a long way to making Mudbox sound as good as folks say it is but yeah, knowing areas where it falls short is helpful too. Nothing wrong with being an informed shopper.

[ambient-whisper]

i still believe that with 1 mil polys you should be getting a very good result for any character.
my monkey model that you might have seen is 3.4mil and hes got a lot of really subtle details in him, which arent THAT neccessary, but i can then extract that detail as a bump map if i choose to. kolby often stays at around 1-2 mil for a lot of his models as well ( atleast he used to as far as i know )

for environments though, or for characters with many objects, or for closeups however....that 1 mil wont go very far at all :D

[DarthWayne]

If your main forms do not look good at 1 milion they sure as god made little green apples are not going to look any better at 100 million lol. Although polys used depends of if you are using a poly modelled base or not. If you are you can save massive ammounts of polys, if not you have to throw more polys at it to get the same detail. (Although as a rule its a far faster workflow.) There's lots of ways of working in digital sculpting...there's no right and wrong only user preference.

Wayne...

[morimitsu]

The quickest way to get 80% of people here to moan about a thing is to put the word 'Autodesk ' in front of it...So I now proudly announce Autodesk 'AIR' so I now await the baited breath from users who refuse to breathe Autodesk air lol.

This is software not religion or team sports...its a hammer or a chisel..not the meaning of life the universe and everything.

Wayne...

lol... But it's true! I coudn't agree more.

[Sonk]

Yes it can..I did an vid on it ages back it's over on MudboxHub (http://www.mudboxhub.com) amongst the QuickStart ones.... Mirroed UV's were one of the 1st tings I tested back in the beta as it was such an important thing to get right for guys working in games.


Wayne...

Try UV unwrapping a human head(as an example), unwrap the left and right side to be identical and stack one on top of the other. Bring that into Mudbox and start painting near the center, it doesn't work for me in SP2 demo. I attached a picture showing artifacts near the center with a stack UV(from the default Mudbox head).

This only happens on area with shared vertices.I'm abit surprised this wasn't address since it was in the original demo. Maybe in SP3?

[DarthWayne]

Try UV unwrapping a human head(as an example), unwrap the left and right side to be identical and stack one on top of the other. Bring that into Mudbox and start painting near the center, it doesn't work for me in SP2 demo. I attached a picture showing artifacts near the center with a stack UV(from the default Mudbox head).?

The wya to do mirroed UV's in mudbox is to move one set 1 uv tile to the right. 99% of engines will recognise the first UV tile for both halves. NEVER stack on tile ontop of another as you are then trying to get mud to put 2 sets of info into one sets space.
[/url][url="http://www.mudboxhub.com/index.php?pageid=QuickStart%20%28lot2%292"]VIDEO LINK (http://www.mudboxhub.com/index.php?pageid=QuickStart%20%28lot2%292)


I did a video on preparing mirrored UV's for mud in the quickstart series that are on mudboxhub.com. (link is above about half way down the page.)So yes mirrored uv's do work but there is no way you can have 2 sets of data on 1 tile...

Wayne...

[Roger Eberhart]

I'm not impressed with this workaround. I can paint on mirrored UVs just fine in Bodypaint, Modo, and 3D Coat. When you move one half of your UVs over in Mudbox, it only displays the half that is in the 0 to 1 UV space. The other half is some random color. Not a great way to judge your texture. Hopefully they will attempt to improve on their workflow and solve the problem properly.

It also appears that the developers are aware that this is a problem. In their release notes under limitations, they say the following:

"Paint does not bleed correctly when UV shells share coincident edges The automatic edge bleed feature may not work as expected while painting whenever UV shells have been laid out to share identical edges or lie exactly on top of each other to optimize texture space.

Workaround: The edge bleed feature is currently designed to work optimally when UV shells are separated. If possible, sew any coincident UV edges to reduce areas where the automatic edge bleed might fail or ensure UV shells have a small distance of separation. Otherwise, if UV shells must be laid out in a coincident fashion, some touch-up to the 2D texture image may be required."

[Sonk]

I'm not impressed with this workaround. I can paint on mirrored UVs just fine in Bodypaint, Modo, and 3D Coat. When you move one half of your UVs over in Mudbox, it only displays the half that is in the 0 to 1 UV space. The other half is some random color. Not a great way to judge your texture. Hopefully they will attempt to improve on their workflow and solve the problem properly.

It also appears that the developers are aware that this is a problem. In their release notes under limitations, they say the following:

"Paint does not bleed correctly when UV shells share coincident edges The automatic edge bleed feature may not work as expected while painting whenever UV shells have been laid out to share identical edges or lie exactly on top of each other to optimize texture space.

Workaround: The edge bleed feature is currently designed to work optimally when UV shells are separated. If possible, sew any coincident UV edges to reduce areas where the automatic edge bleed might fail or ensure UV shells have a small distance of separation. Otherwise, if UV shells must be laid out in a coincident fashion, some touch-up to the 2D texture image may be required."

Yeah i'm not a fan of the workaround for the reason you mention and you as pointed out you can have stacked UVs that have shared vertices in 3DC, it works. Well there is always SP3 or MBx 2010...

[bisenberger]

He He gotta agree with you, it never ceases to amaze how the shutters go up for some people when Autodesk is mentioned, even though they make all the best 3D software. Any way I am enjoying mudbox and appreciated the review.

Somewhere along the way the balance of Autodesk's energies went from producing software to marketing software. They are getting close to monopolizing the market, which is pretty scary in my opinion.

[the_podman]

the smooth brush is slow at larger polycounts. really really really slow, unless your cursor is very tiny or you zoom way in. up until 8 million its really fast.



This is my single reason why I can't use Mudbox as efficiently as Zbrush. A lot of Zbrush veterans may tell you that typically, you wouldn't want to do smoothing and adjustments on "masses" at high polycounts, however, a lot of digital sculptors are actually moving away from this(since brushes like claytubes was added) because it is no longer nessessary to always jump down to the lower subdivs to do this.

What I am curious about is if Autodesk will continue to "brute force" raw polygons in future releases or if they will go with some other tech(like voxels or their own version of pixols), because file sizes are becoming a huge problem. Last I checked a 10 million poly mesh with textures and sculpt layers my file size was quickly approaching 2GB.

-Rod
www.youtube.com/RodneyBrett

[iSOBigD]

Am I the first one who noticed that every single feature mentionned in that "review" has been in ZBrush since version 1.0? (except for the display/render features) ZBrush not only has all the exact brushes and sculpting/painting features mentionned there, but many, many more.

The "review" sounds like it came from someone who never used ZBrush, so all those basic features were new to him. I would have loved to read about something new that ZBrush doesn't have, so that a ZBrush user could actually learn something and maybe be convinced to try Mudbox.

I have no doubt that Autodesk's army of programmers and gigantic budget will make Mudbox win over the tiny Pixologic app., but knowing Autodesk (I use Max), it'll take a few versions to get basic features right. They always tend to take good features from other apps but they're only perfected after 2-3 versions. :P

[tonytrout]

The "review" sounds like it came from someone who never used ZBrush, :P

Your comments sound like you never used mudbox but you've got an opinion anyway

[iSOBigD]

Your comments sound like you never used mudbox but you've got an opinion anyway
Yes but the difference is I clearly stated that I didn't use it and pointed out why the review was not at all informative for me. It sounded like an ad more than like a review. There were no comparissons to similar tools in other software so how can he claim something is "great" without comparing it to anything else? Is it great compared to MS Paint? Is it great compared to ZBrush's smooth, clay, rake, move, etc. brushes? How are those brushes different? Do they give similar results, is the performance better with a similar model? I'm sure many ZBrush users would like to know. You can't claim something's great or the best software available then mainly talk about features or tools which another software has had 4-5 years ago. It's not helpful to the reader.

[tonytrout]

Fair enough, but why not give it a try and see what you think. Theres a free trial available with all the bells and whistles. One thing about mudbox is that its very easy to learn, has a standard interface so it doesnt take much effort to get up to speed with it.

[musashidan]

Am I the first one who noticed that every single feature mentionned in that "review" has been in ZBrush since version 1.0? (except for the display/render features) ZBrush not only has all the exact brushes and sculpting/painting features mentionned there, but many, many more.
:P

Mud texturing is far superior.It dosn't rely on face count as ZB does.And you can paint realtime spec/gloss/reflection mask maps aswell as diffuse/bump maps(ala ZB)Not to mention the PS style layer system and soon to be implemented(but long overdue) clone brush

Also,Mud's displacement/normal extract maps feature does exactly what it says on the tin.
No feckin about.

True,Mud's missing a transpose type feature,but i'm sure that won't last long.

[electrique]

.... the answer is YES!

I have used ZB for awhile and really got to my wicks end with the lack of love towards MAC users over at Pixologic.... waiting i think for a yr now on certain plugins that have still not eventuated.

So I grabbed Mudbox 2009 and I am really loving it... IMHO the panning,layout and general look and feel just makes you want to sit in the app for hours! Is it ZB, its hard to say, they feel like very different apps to me... could Mudbox fit into a production pipeline... yes.

Well done Autodesk on this one! :buttrock:

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