Diving right in, after much toe-dipping (Patreon)

Lately I've been doing something I've been putting off for years - re-learning 3D sculpting. I couldn't decide if I wanted to use Blender or Zbrush, though, so I explored both at the same time. Zbrush nudged ahead, but once I started actually using it, I was comparing the two again...

Maya was used to block in the base shapes, in part because it's familiar, but also because I learned years ago how valuable it can be to be able to pose a figure before you put a lot of work into it. On one game, I was tasked with rigging a zombie whose fingers didn't align with the rig. The rig couldn't be changed, and if it could, the lengths and orientations of the model's fingers meant that it couldn't make a fist. Some fingers would bend the wrong way, some were too long or too short, or too thin. I decided at that point that if I was ever going to sculpt, I would partially rig the figure so that I could be sure the fingers could make a proper fist.

Getting the block-out into Zbrush was more of a challenge than I'd expected. I did so in 3 parts - head, eyes, and ears. On import, he position and scale of each part seems to be random. One will come in too big, another too small, and another "just right". Even for the reference drawings, there doesn't seem to be any way to match them 1:1 with their size in Maya.

Blender at least imports the objects cleanly, but the size of the reference drawings needs to be eyeballed. I spent maybe 15 minutes sculpting before I'd decided to give Zbrush another look. I kept having to turn x-ray mode on & off to check if anything I was doing lined up with my drawings. Zbrush has the option of projecting lines from the cursor to the images, so I can see if things line up without having to switch to a front or side view.

After about 30 minutes in Zbrush, I had to resist the nagging voice in my head that's trying to convince me that I could model Candy easier by box-modeling her in Maya.