Pixels to Polygons: A 3D Artist’s Guide from Blender to Autodesk Maya and ZBrush
I am a 3D Generalist and not a very hardened one at that, I am still learning new things everyday. But that puts me in an advantage to still be able to connect to people who are beginners, or astray from this path. I wanted to share my experience as of right now and my views on the tools which every 3D artist is going to grasp.
Having worked in almost every aspect of CGI industry like Games, VFX as well as advertisements, I have a fairly broad spectrum of tools in my arsenal and we are going to a journey in a chronological order (first one is what I learned first) within different timeframes and my Impressions of them to see which ones to use for your needs.
The quotes are my own, And this is my own journey.
Blender
The Free and open source software is a giant powerhouse of features and sets of workflows which makes you question if almost every other tool which asks for money is worth it or not.
It can be used, for anything really. It has loads of features a lot of which are even almost perfect.
First month Impression
“Oh my god this is soo easy to use, wait how to do this though?”.
The software’s UI is really amazing to say the least. It falls under ‘Inspiring’ UI’s (my own category) since I discovered new things each time a task was performed, and I did not feel like its limited to any degree.
I followed the doughnut tutorials by Blender guru and fell in love with its power.
“Can I make transformers Autobots already then?”
There will always be some things for which I was not be able to find a way to do but it’s the case of every tool, Blender is an easy to learn software but it can be non-intuitive sometimes. Not to worry though, It has one of the best communities I have ever seen so you should not face any problems if you just reach out as I did.
Six months Impression
“This is amazing, I can do everything in this, I can make a movie!”
Once I got the hang of things; the concepts, the pipeline, organization tricks, etc. I was tempted to do a big project (a short story, because now I could). And that was to be a turning point in my view of blender.
I made the Short story Bridge when I got very used to blender. And After making it I realized:
The software can do a lot of different things but it can do only a few things perfectly. That’s what I might want in my next big project; Perfection. practically perfection is unattainable yes, but what I mean is; Not being laggy, slow, jittery, artifacts producing and when faced with a heavy scene (which was the case most of the times). And that brings us to:
Two years (or more) Impression
“I’ll use blender just for modeling now, for rendering I’ll use Arnold.”
I knew the strengths and weaknesses. So for certain things I was leaning towards other tools, which I knew can handle the task much better.
This is a true story; In college I used to submit my modeling assignments with blender(even though Maya was the official tool of curriculum) and there was never a problem. When I moved to the next semester, I had to do a small advertisement kind of animation.
So me being a stubborn blenderist, rendered the whole thing with Cycles (blender 2.7 at that time)It all took two days (not continuously) to render and I thought they looked great, until I submitted it to my professor.
He called me seperately to his office and he just knew I rendered it with Cycles, I was struck with lightning.
“I am going to give you one and only one day to re-render in Arnold otherwise I will give you a zero in this.” -My Professor
When I got home I started the work, and I had the textures, the model, I learned alembic that day and exported animation and rendered in arnold. “Oh my god that’s how he knew” The renders had a different contrast level. The metals looked very different and way too real. In front of that my old renders looked like a child’s drawing. Plus, it took only 3 hours to render!
That’s when I first realized I had been living in a bubble, now I never wanted to render in cycles again, which meant I had my fun with blender. It was time to get serious, It was time to learn a new software.
Autodesk Maya
The industry giant which needs little introduction. Whenever a baby learns to talk about 3d, Maya are the first words.
A blender user like me tells myself “I know the concepts, just need to learn the UI and use the concepts there”, This little phrase is used a lot when learning new software and while it does provide confidence, It does little when actually learning the tool.
Concepts might be same, yes. But the implementation of them, even name of the concept, keyboard shortcuts, mouse navigation, modeling tools, their locations, UI, Attribute editor, Hypershade, UV editor and other basic needs are completely different. Its almost like learning a new software just a bit faster since you immediately associate the concepts in your brain.
First month Impression
“This is a piece of trash, Why would they not give keyboard shortcuts for modeling like in blender?, Why these features are kept on different places when they belong together, Aaarrghhh I miss blender”
“Why does it keep saving history and lagging my scene?, How can someone work on this for eight hours a day?”
Maya’s UI is neither intuitive nor inspiring, it does things which users cannot understand, its not bug free and costs a fortune (It makes sense as a B2B product) which is why it lands on my ‘Depressing’ UIs’ list.
The only satisfaction comes while rendering, the results are amazing. Absolutely a delight and a lot of times, worth all this trouble. The only reasons for keep on grinding are the renders and the fact I was learning something which was used to render The Avengers.
Six Months Impression
“Oh that’s why it saves history. Oh wow I didn’t know it is node based, I can control anything with anything?”
“This scene used to hang blender, but works so great in this. Oh my god I just wish I didn’t have to pay this much for it.”
The grinding is complete, and now I knew how to use the tool, Now I collected the rewards;
Stability: It is incredible at handling large scenes, fluid in retopologizing, good for organizing both as layers and groups. Materials are a bit tricky but I know how to make it work for me.
It’s an incredibly vast software: which means I was never done exploring. Even for little things there are tons of features and controls. Lots to learn yes but that much more control.
Node Based: A dream for rigging, Blender can never attach just any value from any object in the scene to any property of another object of the scene (Blender’s driver feature, yes but its not versatile).
Collaborative: Its an incredible software to make collaborative tools for huge teams and pipelines. Something that can be done in blender but not as easily and for a huge amount of people.
Support: If you have legit Maya license and if you encounter any bug or problem in your project, You can easily raise a ticket and the support has to get in touch.
Two years Impression
“I do not like the modeling tools of it but I like the retopo tools, re-meshing tools and of course, Look dev, lighting and rendering.”
“I can do and study realistic skin Look development in Arnold.”
I have now setup my workflow such that I use both blender (for blocking, modeling) and Maya (for look development and rendering). I know both of them are important in their ways. Maya is Depressing of course but It always gets the job done. I now understand why it’s the industry standard.
A blender user like me still cannot stare at a maya screen for hours, its a depressing UI. which is why I like the fact that things which take time, like modeling can be done in blender and then imported into maya for further action.
After modeling and UVs, almost no other task can be shifted from one software to other, so if my target renderer is Arnold, I’ll get ready to do lookdev of materials, rig, light and setup AOVs inside Maya.
But now there are more things that must be done and cannot be done inside either Maya or Blender. I need to perform a Sculpt pass for characters and detailing of props. That cannot be done through poly modeling.
It’s time to go to another one for sculpting.
Zbrush
This is an industry standard software by Maxon for primarily used for Sculpting and 3D painting.
A completely different piece of software which is so deeply packed with features that I first became overwhelmed.
Everyone said to me that for sculpting it is amazing, it can handle more polygons than frankly any other software because it has a different algorithm of drawing the quads on the screen. Go for millions of polys and see no lag.
And that is a necessity for my because I always aim for photorealism, and It requires high poly and high quality sculpts
But it does have all the names of the features different and I could not relate the concepts to save my life with any 3D software that I learned before.
SO AGAIN WE START FROM SCRATCH!
First Month Impression
“Its amazing that I cannot understand anything in this at all! What are tools? Subtools? How to import? Export? There is a Remesher and a ZRemesher. Not at all confusing, right?”
The UI is completely and utterly jumbled. No attribute editor, no materials editor. No conventional modeling tools. It’s a new way of doing everything.
So I grinded. I myself started with a hundred of tutorials which did honestly help a lot. I then watched all of the hundred tutorials again to understand things on top of a 48 hours course that I bought to actually do something in this.
The UI of Zbrush is different, but its not under ‘Depressing’ UIs. I can even very easily customize it to your liking. And if you can do that, you will get very comfortable very quickly.
Six Months Impression
“Finally after six months, here it is! my first project…. But what is it?”
Six months is enough time to press and get used to any tool. So I probably knew by now all the major features to use and in which order. There are some special ‘IMM Brushes’ which are great but take some getting used to. There are still a lot of features I did not touch. But I was not going to anyway. At least not for a year.
I tried on a few projects but they came out a bit …. let’s just say they could be better.
I was still afraid to deal with too many subtools. and didn’t go into too much detail or I went into detail very quickly.
All of these had less to do with my learning the software and more with the fact I was new to ‘Sculpting’. The sense of three dimensional forms, techniques, brush to eye coordination and the ‘From Big to small details’ strategy was still under development. I did understand the software pretty well though.
Two years Impression
“I am getting pretty good at this, there are others who are a different league than myself, though. But if I keep at it I’ll at least be recognizable”.
“Oh damn, I don’t believe I made it. I can’t wait to texture it and render properly in Arnold. The skin will look amazing I bet!”
The software is only used primarily for characters, props and texturing (primarily displacement, AO and normal maps).
I knew this but I had gotten good at sculpting, even though there is a sea of settings and features, you only use which you need.
I made a good Human face and even skin details and put it on artstation.
Blender’s sculpting tools are really good, but they lack in maintaining symmetry and handling large amount of polygons, to say the least. Which makes Zbrush a necessity for making high quality sculptures.
Sculptures are an essential part of the CGI workflow. They provide human touch and artistry to an object. Once the textures are baked from high poly sculpture to its low poly counterpart, the work of the sculpture is done.
Texturing Softwares
But there is a last piece of puzzle remaining, There are different softwares for texturing. which are required because even though Blender, Zbrush and Maya all have texture painting features, they are just a formality; I now needed to learn Substance Painter.
Substance Painter
A complete delight of a software. Finally!
At first glance I knew, This is Fun! It’s intuitive, It’s definitely in my ‘Inspiring’ UIs’ list. And it’s industry standard (Adobe duh..) I didn’t get to see that a lot.
It’s layer stack is a lot like photoshop, So if anyone is fimiliar with Ps as myself they will not have any problem learning this.
It does have some unfimiliar things like ‘Effects’ on both the layer and the layer’s mask. It’s something to understand but once understood its a piece of cake.
There are two best things about this
Baker: The baking mechanism is fast, easy to use and if the model and UVs dont have any issues, it gives fantastic results.
Shelf: The material library, smart materials, grunges, brushes, generators and smart masks all work together to give me exactly the kind of look I want and more.
First month Impression
“Its amazing, I can do a lot very quickly, I don’t need to know a lot about texturing, half the time I don’t even know what I am doing!”
The export mechanism is a bit complicated but once understood, no problem at all. Just something to do that’s all.
Six Month Impression
“Its nice, The materials and all are amazing, it’s a lot like blender’s Evee engine and I understand the Metal-Roughness workflow perfectly”
It just keeps getting better and better with each update, I doubt I felt the need of switching the softwares until….
Two Year Impression
“I want to just project the reference image to the model but its projection painting is not very good.”
“Ahh I projected somehow but now I can’t use its color map to make this layer’s roughness map somehow ?(Well there is a way but you don’t have a lot of control and it’s not intuitive)”
“I have to do a VFX shot and there’s a large building with 200+ texture tiles. Substance is not able to handle it. What to do”
Here’s what you do, you turn your eyes towards Foundry. But that wasn’t until I joined MPC and they gave me assignment to do in the Foundry product; Mari.
Mari
The VFX counterpart of Substance Painter, able to do the only things the Adobe software cannot yet.
This is unlike Substance Painter in many cases;
The UI is towards the ‘Depressing’ UIs list. It’s not really a fun software and it’s shader is pretty bad so I could not see the result in real time properly.
But that’s the thing, I didn’t need to anyway. The files that are usually run through it are so large in terms of texture tiles that my machine wasn’t able to render a real time result so it doesn’t make sense to show a good render.
I had to export textures each time I made a change into the rendering software.
It shows you perfectly one channel at a time. eg; The above picture shows only color channel
Mari is a purely industry standard software and was not intended as a B2C product. Which is why they didn’t pay that much attention to the UI of it.
But make no mistake, this Gets the job Done!
First month Impression
“What is this trash? The layers stack is really bad and I don’t get why I can just infinitely attach masks inside of masks? How is it working?”
“The painting tool of this is really bad, What is this paint buffer? Why I can’t just paint normally like in Substance painter?”
The painting is handled differently. Instead just painting directly, The painted data will be temporarily stored in a ‘buffer’ first. Then can be baked onto the model, This almost always results in artifacts.
Six Months Impression
“Oh I get it now, The stack actually represents the nodes which are being made automatically, I actually prefer the nodes anyway, I can connect anything to anything and see it visually”
Being a blender user really gives a towering advantage in this software, Yes it is Node Based. Unlike substance painter, Consider this as the Shader Editor of blender. I could mix colors, make roughness, displacement, normal maps and more only from color map.
I realized the paint buffer is actually a necessary technique to have since I had a big model and so many texture tiles in front of me that if it painted directly my system would hang a lot. So it let me paint on a buffer first and then when I was done painting from that angle, took its time and baked the paint on the texture tiles.
Plus I could go upto 32k textures. I know, Crazy.
“Its actually a better software, it handles objects versions, multiple objects, selection groups, It even bakes, I can tweak displacement maps pretty good with it, and the export manager is very simple to use.”
Two Years Impression
“I know its a good software but substance painter has its own strengths”
Actually, not all the models in VFX pipeline are 200+ texture tiles. Most of them are under 10 tiles, which substance can handle, but when it comes to manual painting, generating masks and producing base textures, Substance comes out ahead again.
Now I incorporated both the softwares in my workflow like most industry professionals. I use substance for baking, base texture, Masks and painting.
I then use Mari for projection painting, manipulating base and projection maps, making secondary maps from color of projection and final tweaking.
And so finally after thousands of hours of grinding, tutorials, practice and rush work, I am confident in my ability to make any kind of 3D environment, character, prop and scene.
Let’s Conclude
It was a fascinating overview of the major softwares I have learned over the years, Of course I left some and the engines (They are their own thing I’ll write a seperate piece on them). I mainly focused on major softwares you would need to just create and render 3D assets.
In as brief as possible we saw what tools I had to learn to become a professional, someone in this business cannot stay confined in one tool, that being said, tools are secondary. If your understanding is ample, you can use any tool.
All the tools’ pros and cons are based on my experience of them and at the time I learned and used them. As technology advances, We will see better and new tools and their versions.