ZBrush and Daz (Match made in heaven or hell?)

[RomanHume]

Wow! My first thread topic. Here's to hoping it doesn't suck...

Seriously though, I've been working in Daz for awhile now and I've explored almost everything it has to offer. In an effort to expand upon my set of artistic tools I've recently completed a couple of online courses on ZBrush.

I gotta say, ZBrush is amazing and there is enormous potential there, however, what I'm really curious about is the integration between Daz and ZBrush. This week I've learned that when Exporting objects from Daz to ZBrush, you are free to make all the changes you want. But if you are going to send your modifications back to Daz, you better not disturb the poly-count.

I'm just curious if there are others around here who are using a combination of Daz and ZBrush to create art, and if so, what's your work flow like? What kinds of manipulations are you using ZBrush for? How detrimental is it, being unable to change the resolution of the object if you intend to send it back to Daz for render?

Just want to know what other people are doing so I can give some thought to my own processes going forward.

Cheers all!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I don't use Z brush, but I do use Blender for many of the same reason.

I port to blender .fbx files while I am still experimenting with ideas. I mainly have to fix the legs and back, and I don't usually sculpt, instead I am mostly fixing the leg proportions to be less american like, it bugs me how persistant the leg thickness is across just about all character morphes, so I always have to tailor it to my needs.

If I want to keep a character, have it as a slider for later use, I have to do a bunch of trickery with .obj files and several of daz's tools to generate a new character, and this is still a process I am learning.

I usually in the end export a .fbx file to blender, where I make custom shaders, automate the rig, pose/animate and anything else I want, and use Blender's Cycle render engine to basically beat out the default Iray, in both speed and quality. I am just more comfortable with blender because I have used it for longer.

most of my public examples can be found here