Blender is definitely one of a kind. It's completely free, yet the devs still make decent money through donations. I've donated to them several times. This is how it should be.

Finally someone talking about transitioning from Zbrush to Blender. Thank you Niko, you're the best!

I first started using Zbrush in 2019 and you were one of the first Zbrush channels I saw. I was so inspired by your high level skill set, I bought your course on Udemy. I support you no matter what platform you use, As a 2D animator trying out 3D for the first time, I couldn’t believe how the hell you made such phenomenal and detailed character anatomies. You’re incredible, sir.

Wow! So full of HONESTY! straightforward talk! Kudos

i love your energy!! you have great charisma

Thank you, looking forward to your next Blender course.

Sad to see what a greedy company like Maxon can mean for the industry. When they bought Red Giant (plugin for After Effect) they started to flush out their former customers. When they then bought Z-Brush I knew it was time to look elsewhere. Thanks for sharing your experience with Blender. I'm seriously considering switching from Maya to Blender, but haven't quite had the guts to switch yet... have tried Blender a bit. What appeals to me most about Blander is their community and their willingness to share knowledge, something that all the other players don't come close to.

I think this is the best marketing-video for Blender I have seen. An obviously very competent 3D-creator who has worked with many different 3D-SW-program is saying that Blender is good, and even really good. And remember, it is the skills that matters, not the tools, so if you have excellent free SW like Blender, nothing can stop you!

Thank you sir for your blender tutorials

I use both, Zbrush for sculpting and Blender for everything else, perfect combination.

Super nice to get the perspective from someone as experienced as you on this topic.

Great talk, very interesting. Bought a number of your courses, appreciate your humour and skill. And your head is perfect for the Zoom blur filter! I watched another video a while back by a ZBrush character artist trying Blender discussing something she found to be a game changer; she set up lights on a virtual turntable so she could test the contours more easily as she worked! She reckoned while ZBrush is better for details, Blender is better for the initial sculpting up to the high-poly work, partly because it is true 3D, not 2.5D, and can have proper perspective and lighting. And there’s been a significant upgrade to the sculpting tools since, inc the hair system.

I appreciate your honesty regarding the money aspect of blender courses. It's refreshing. Thanks for being honest and sharing your true opinions

Very useful video. Thanks, Niko!

Blender is my favorite app too, & its continually improving thanks to the active community, & the ongoing donations many make. By the way, there are more sculpting & higher-poly handling upgrades coming in the future as well, so these areas will continue to improve. More sculptors engaging & making feature requests/ bug reports, etc. this also helps for an area to get more focus in progress.

Dear Niko, thank you for your sincere explanations. While learning Zbrush, I mostly benefited from your content, although I used blender before you, I still learn from you. I'm so glad to have you..

Keep doing your work, you don't even know how much you helped me to achieve what i achieved. Maybe Im now frustrated with proper face texturing, but I think that I'll learn it as time passes by (and Im still pretty new in Sculpting and 3D overall... maybe little more than a year). You are a great teacher :D

I'm in the same camp. I use Blender for pretty much the entire process. The three main things I still wish to see in Blender's sculpting are morph targets, sculpt layers and a way to fix symmetry the same way zbrush does with the smart resym function.

Blender is a jack of all trades. With some addons (free and paid) it has incredible potential.

I use blender more than anything these days, used to be a 3dsmax user+ maya+ zbrush( 20 years +) I haven't quite got in to the blender sculpting yet, though have done a few head sculpts. But yeah Blender is perfectly fine for nearly every aspect of 3d these days. all the models/animations/characters on my channel are done in Blender

The Blender community is huge and highly interactive

Great video! I'm a maya and ZBrush user for quite some years but switched to blender recently. In comparrison to maya I really like it as much, but for sculpting I prefer ZBrush for now. However I have to say I only started Blender two weeks ago so I have to get accustomed to it some more for sure.

I learned Zbrush from your courses, and later on Blender on my own. Zbrush is extremely powerful... but Blender is way WAY easier and faster to use, that won me over. While Zbrush is industry standard, Blender has the potential to be as powerful in a few years.

I love your works!!!

I've been wanting to ask you this forever! Thank you for addressing this.

Keep doing what your doing! You have very wonderful and easy to understand lessons. And I also like your English). Thank you

I love you so much my man. Keep spittin truth!

You are totally right, the best thing about blender is that blender tools are evolving fast and getting more and more reliable. So blender is slowly entering industry stantard mode. I use it for VFX last 3 years

Congrat on the video! I switched from zbrush to Nomad Sculpt + Blender and nothing has changed in my working time.

Thanks Nico! Very nice view

I've been planning the same move. Been a zbrush user since 2005 and Maxon ruined the experience. Blender has SO many tools that zbrush doesn't have and the sculpting is getting closer and closer all the time. Thanks for making this vid. It completely reinforces my own thoughts.

I'm glad to hear that, hopefully see a tutorial of female and man sculpt in blender

Speed char is the most transparent and honest 3D artist and tutor I know. The guy is just too real lol

it is always about where you are beter, faster more variable etc... doesnt matter if you use blender maya z-brush. if you can deliver final product use what ever you want to .

I ditched ZBrush for Blender after forking over the big $ and then less than a year later they sold out and started charging for updates. I could kinda deal with ZBrush's terrible UI, but for indie GameDev work, it's nice being able to use as few apps as possible (free is great too). So now it's just Blender and Substance Designer (ditched Substance Painter for Blender as well). Keep the Blender tutorials coming!! :)

Great to see you transition to Blender. Showcasing that you're a great artist no matter what software you use.

Nico, your monster you showed us is very cool! It would be great to see a course where you make a similarly complex game monster.

Great ! I sculpt in Blender an find it cool. I tried using Zbrush but haven't gotten used to it. This reassures me that I should probably stick with what I know and just hone the sculpting fundamentals.

Wow I never thought I would see the day. I've never used ZBrush but I've heard a lot of people prefer it - or at least they did just a few years ago. By the way, I love your demon huntress course!

Thank you Niko!

I also have been using Blender recently for Rendering my sculpts and it's damn good. I am encouraged by you to use it for sculpting too. Will sure make a move. Thank you

The reason I made the switch was the cost, but also it's so much easier to do things like add new geometry and modify the texture, light, and render. It will also look more accurate to how it will in the software you render it in because it doesn't have matcaps ingrained. You have so many more options including geometry nodes, easy, non-destructive hair, shader editor, animation and rigging, and not to mention rendering stills and animation. I think ZBrush is best if sculpting is all you ever will do, but Blender is such a blessing to artists because it will always be free. Thanks for being transparent about this - its something not everyone will admit because they get bullied into paying for ZBrush by its user base.

Zbrush is no longer an option for freelancer, hobbyists and small budget artists. I have a perpetual license and love it even if it doesn't update anymore (thank you very much Maxon), but I know eventually I'm gonna need to move on to blender.

i followed a lot of your tutorials, and since we both from the Balkans, I was always very sympathetic to the mentality. Most importantly, I learned that you don't have to take everything so damn seriously. Names don't count, because at the end of the day, it's the skills and the tools that count. Sadly, my transformation in sculpting is not finished, so I need zbrush still for high density concepts. But I am working on it. Especially now since they joined the dark side. Thank you for your honest video.

Open source is the future. It really is amazing how much easier it is to learn these programs when there's just such a vast amount of people creating and teaching online

Thank you very much for sharing your insights , considering all the experience you have this is very valuable information for someone like me who doesn't have the budget to pay for a Zbrush subscription and would like to get into 3d modelling and sculpting.. Merci

I will buy Niko Blender tutorials, when i am done learning 3DCoat. I learned so much zbrush from his course, fun and easy to follow along.

I cant even think of going from ZBrush to Blender. I feel too comfortable in ZB, my nerves and time have a price too :D BUT I agree with Nico 100%. Specially if you are barely starting - no need for ZBrush. Besides - like Nico said - sculpting itself, anatomy - all that is the same no matter what software you are using. I am still watching Nico sculpting in Blender even if I am not using it because techniques apply to any software. Also Nico - props for saying openly that one of the reason is popularity of Blender and fact that you can sell more tutorials on it. Its not something people would openly say - they would rather hide it behind "because Blender is so AWESOOOOMMEEEE!! And FREE!!!". blablabla. Youre a great guy. Hope to see you coming back to ZBrush one day - because mate, they are adding some pretty cool things (and I dont mean Redshift hahaha). So maybe in a year or two you will have plenty of reasons to check it out. Much luck and thanks for great videos. My characters got WAY better since I found your first video on YT ages ago. You thought me a lot and you keep on doing so. Greetings from Mexico!

Brilliant video. Subbed. Just REALLY hoping they continue Pablos work in sculpting, and increase the poly count, to a level closer to Zbrush.

love your blender video

Zbrush is godlike for sculpting!

Hey Niko Thanks for this video!!! I am wondering if you would upload someday a Character with Hardsufrace in Blende,r i would love to see how you model hard surface in blender! Thanks.

I'm not following Maxon down the subscription rat hole, but in my view when it comes to sculpting, Zbrush is just better. I do think however, that as time goes on and Blender improves while my 2022 perpetual license gets outdated I will eventually move to Blender permanently. Today every time I try working with Blender I eventually go back to ZBrush.

Welcome to the B community Brother :)

I purchased the ultimate stylized character sculpting course. I'll see if zbrush is worth keeping

Blender is quite fun and capable for what I need but I've never tried the sculpting. Looks like I should give it a shot.

I recommend to use both

thats funny to hear that, I did the same experiment a couple of years ago when I'm working doing characters for a company, and doing the hole pipeline, so it had Zbrush for sculpts and Blender for everything else till a day I had to sculpt a new character and I tried sculpt it in Blender, it was in 2018 so the sculpting tools are not that great, but was amazing don't bother with Zbrush UI that I never liked, it was really cool to move to do everything in Blender. As a generalist I sometimes pass months without sculpting stuff doing other 3D/2D stuffs, and your videos always make me miss sculpting, its so cool to see you process.

That's why i'm using blender. Most people want the best, but actually don't really need the best. I'd rather have something really good that i can use for everything instead of having to learn a new user interface for every new tool. And i've worked already more than 20 years in 3D. Is it perfect? Hell no, it's just another buggy app like all the others. But the blender team has convinced me they are actually about cleaning up their shit. They overhauled blender majorily already two times despite the danger of pissing off their fans, which earned my deepest respect. 2.5 was great, but 2.8 was a milestone that kicked the butt of every competitor and changed 3D graphics forever.

Agreed, I have your Zbrush tutorials, and I can still learn everything and port it to Blender, I swapped 2022 from Maya/C4d/Zbrush so glad to see you did the same I can catch up on sculpting again. Plus Zbrush is very different workflow than normal 3d whereas Blender isn't. Plus it's free, great when I'm not earning!

Very earnest spoken word on Blender and Zbrush, thank you my friend!!

Keep making tutorials, I love them and buy them

For many years us old timers had a great price range on Zbrush with free updates, before they began to up it and charge for updates as well, which is fair enough. Alas now they, as many others, got sold and ended up in subscription hell which will definitely scare new potential users away. From that POV it makes total sense to take on Blender, it's an awesome package.

i hope i can make the same change as you... i really like the real camera view, real materials and setup in my work in progress in blender, but it's hard to give up zbrush. I mean it's like moving into your new home where you have to buy new furniture, get used to the environment and new layout, create a new workflow, etc.

there still some function on Zbrush like radial multi symmetry brush or Zsketch, that i can't replicate on Blender and it help me a lot, especialy for making roots on tree or very organic stuff, on the other side, Sculpt mode is phenomenal on Blender, also Geometry node, but need a lot of time consuming to achieve similar result. Blender is my main render and animation and particule FX tool of choice of course, but when it's about sculpting fine detail Zbrush with Substance Painter is my main combo.

Nice ❤️ story 🍁 learnt so many things..

My favourite tutor on the internet💯

Te admiro muchisimo hermano. Saludos desde Cuba

Hi nice video, what would you recommend for realistic character design hardware specs, and what your hardware do you use to character design. Maybe a video about it.

Hey Niko, Just wanted to say, you have a perfect temporal line, the plane change looks so good as if you used trim dynamic and hpolish then zremeshed.

I've been using Blender from 2004 and I bought Zbrush not long after it first came out. I think it was about £350 at the time. The problem with Pixologic is that they were too generous, which is crazy compared to Autodesk etc. I and I'm sure most others would have happily paid an upgrade fee for the milestone releases, now instead we have Maxon taking the piss. Meanwhile, Blender has improved consistently year after year to the point where I don't need an external render engine, the UV workflow is great and there are hundreds of great plugins. The sculpting isn't quite on par with Zbrush but I imagine it will be in 2 or 3 years. I'll use my last free upgrade of Zbrush until then but honestly I could also switch now without much hassle.

You got to try SDF modeling too! they are adding in Blender as well! plus Conjure SDF Add On for Blender is coming up too! I personally use Made In Dreams and Unbound! I will try those for Blender once they come out! but mixing SDF with Polygon is the most fastest and easiest way of working! you can even texture with SDF too! can be used as a base!

i went from sculptris to zbrush core and then down to meshmixer when i couldn't afford it any more, and now blender. i'm very happy with it. wish i knew blender could do sculpting earlier.

I switched from 3ds to blender. When blender 2.8 was released. I thought i really want to give it a try. I was absolutely surprised. The speed. The workflow the technique the placement of buttons and shortcuts all make much more sense on blender. 3ds max suddenly felt old out dated slow and buggy. I never looked back. Super excited to use it every day for work. Lucky to be able to work with blender everyday.

muito bom, eu uso o blender ha mais de 20 anos e não troco por nenhum outro, por ser open ainda temos a vantagem de qualquer pessoa criar addons. o blender faz qualquer coisa que o zbrush faz; se não nativamente, certamente você encontrara algum addon pago ou não. mas o senhor tocou em um ponto crucial que é. o blender é uma ferramenta mas quem faz o trabalho são os artistas e para isso é necessário anos de estudos e praticas. abraços do brazil.

Thanks, this helps.

I remember asking you about this two years ago and you said to stay in ZBrush 😂 I kinda figured Blender would catch up though.

I worked with Carrara for many years but also had an eye on blender but never tried it out. But when i wanted to create characters, Carrara was very limited within it's functionality why i was beginning to work with blender and to be honest, i never regret that step as from what that software can do it really is a great program. Compared to the price with other software, blender is the best choice. One thing that can be better within blender is if you have a specific amount of verts, it gets very laggy even if you have lots of RAM blender could use and from what i've heard is that zBrush can easily handle millions of verts.

Hey Niko! What about the micro detailing in blender? Can it be done?

i agree with you electroboom brother. blender is more efficient if you understand the shortcut, unlike zbrush which is very hard to find one specific ui button. but zbrush is more better when sculpting high poly model, for me blender will just crash when too much polygon. I love blender but the software can't process high poly model.

Me encantaría aprender a esculpir con Blender, soy autónomo de otro sector en España y el tiempo no es mucho el que tengo. Necesito encontrar ese flujo de trabajo en algún momento. Un saludo.

Very well. I'm still going to ask this question every 15 minutes on your livestreams though.

people remember to donate to blender to help the team to develop even better features!

Great channel and videos. Curious, have you ever tried NOMAD app on the iPad?

Ouch, I buy Zbrush when I see your Work and discover your tutorial on Udemy. I love your video and your tuto. Thank you to share your knowledge.

Finally, the Original Niko with the blue t-shirt is back

yeah, that is one thing i miss abbot blender is its customizability.

Hiya, I have enjoyed watching your videos, I've saved the character playlist for future. I've been "dabbling" in Blender on and off for a few years. I bought a Kamvas 22 a while back (a year maybe) but I'm really not sure how to control things with it. Could you recommend one of your videos to follow through to get used to using the tablet and pen, or any other pen/tablet exercises Thanks Mick ps. just bought your head sculpting course on Udemy in anticipation

you brought back the blue shirt!

I need my clay buildup brush translated into blender (working just as in zbrush... Clay strips is garbage at least for me) and I'm willing to migrate 100% to blender. Some minor things I don't like much on blender (vs paid programs) but definitely not deal breakers are: •Retopology: way easier in maya •UV: again maya wins for me, but the king would be rizomUV if it wasnt another ultra expensive tool •Adding displacement: Zbrush is just like press 2 buttons (new texture or load texture, load displacement map), blender you have to do a slight ritual to setup •sculpting layers: this may probably be a unfair comparison but when dealing with realistic characters there comed the time to break symmetry and it definitely helps you handle things non-destructively... Probably im missing more from blender sculpting mode but only alternative in blender i can think of rn is just git gud. •Hair system: i know geometry nodes were a game changer, but comparing strictly blender particle system vs maya xgen I'm more used to xgen On the good side its really monstruous that blender can do basically everything in one software: sculpting, modeling, retopo, uv, texturing, rigging, animating, etc. and all for free! Also seeing how d-bag Autodesk as a company is i really prefer to encourage people to use blender than giving the greedy autodesk more money (not talking about the Jack Sparrow alternative here *Wink wink*), in the end the absolute best selling point i can talk about blender is addons, there are really few things you are used to in other software that doesnt have an addon (although some are paid, but most of the time its cheaper to pay for a blender addon than the software that created that specific workflow).

I absolutely despise zbrush’s interface. I have your latest blender character course too so I’ll be trying that out soon thank you!

Gameloft Alumni. Nice. I am just starting to learn blender and like knowing I picked a good program to put my faith in

A great guy!

I'm not well versed in Blender sculpting, but for 3d in general, I really enjoy it (over 3ds Max - I'm dipping my toes in Maya, and so far, I'm not impressed, but I digress). I have seen great things done in Blender sculpting and I think I want to learn this and use it as part of my 3d modelling tool box. It seems that overall it is pretty robust in this department. Couple this with geometry nodes and boy oh boy, the sky's the limit!

we're just talking about sculpting here, you can also do so much stuff in blender from animation to special effects and procedural generation. It has everything.. yes its not the best at everything but your skills make the results not just the tools

I have a similar story. I've been an environment artist in the games industry for ~20 years, using Max, Maya and Modo. I wanted to try Blender so when I got an environment brief across my desk I decided to learn Blender while doing the brief. I haven't opened Maya, Max or Modo since and I very rarely use zbrush now. Yes, you need some 1-time-payment paid add-ons to really make it sing... but Blender is getting better with every release. I would never go back to any 3D software I've previously used.

but niko...thanks for this answer everyone was asking, i already knew because you told in a live but a vid is much behar to clarify, i have a sugestion: do a video about why you decided to go more stylized over the more realistic tutorials you have done in the past for zbrush, i know blender have limitations but it can do much behar render than zbrush for example getting a very realistic image, maybe a course about render is on the way we will see...

You can't go wrong with learning Blender! It's free AND highly capable. I moved from working in a VFX studio using Maya for 5 years to running a tiny (1 person) animation studio for the past 4 years. I haven't missed Maya at all and using it would have cost me almost $10k by now. But, I did have to set up hot keys similar to Maya because Blender's default controls are atrocious. Also, the community Addon support is incredible and a total lifesaver for a small studio where I don't have time to build everything from scratch.

I have to agree. After using zbrush for many years, I started using 3dCoat and fell in love. Now I jump between 3dcoat and blender. Nothing can compete with zbrush when it comes to bad UI. It just killed my love for sculpting.

You are the Best!!!!