I will never install zbrush!

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Yes I have ADHD

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I’ll chime in on this one. Let me start by saying I’m both a Nomad Sculpt & ZBrush user, desktop & iPad. I’ve been using Nomad for about 3 years and ZBrush (desktop) for 23 years; I just subbed to the iPad version a few weeks ago. Here are my observations.

ZBRUSH
â—Źâ—ŹPROâ—Źâ—Ź

  • The desktop version is industry standard. For better or worse, if you want to be employable, at least knowing it is an advantage.
  • It has a higher poly limit. On paper, you can add more fine detail.
  • There are more ways to start a model (eg. ZSpheres)
  • There are more brushes (eg. Dam Standard & cloth)
  • VDM for adding in instant detail
  • ZRemesher
  • Live Booleans
  • The community is larger

â—Źâ—ŹCONâ—Źâ—Ź

  • Rendering sucks, rather it’s too basic
  • It’s bloated; Even on the iPad, I feel that certain older features should be deprecated.
  • The GUI is horrible & practically insanity inducing for n00bs. It’s a shade better for the iPad, but it still pretty bad. I guess it was a small miracle that they could port ZBrush to iPad at all though.
  • The iPad has a lower poly count ceiling than the desktop version; Micropoly functionality is NOT present atm.
  • The iPad version still doesn’t have ZModeler, which means that you might need to work in Maya or Blender on a PC or use something like Valance 3D or DG Art on iOS for your poly modeling needs
  • The iPad version can be buggy & temperamental
  • For now, the iPad still has only 1/2 the number of brushes as the desktop version
  • $90/yr on the iPad isn’t terrible compared $400/yr on the desktop, but a subscription is a subscription. You own nothing.

NOMAD SCULPT
â—Źâ—ŹPROâ—Źâ—Ź

  • The built-in renderer is top notch, especially for something on iOS.
  • The GUI is easy enough to use for n00bs, but offers enough feature-level customization to be valuable to power users
  • Performance is excellent, allowing a good 40mil+ sculpts on high end M4 iPad Pro tablets. Getting even half that in Blender on a high end Core i9 with a RTX 4090 without getting chuggy… Good luck.
  • Better scene organization
  • Perpetual license

â—Źâ—ŹCONâ—Źâ—Ź

  • No Dam Standard equivalent. You can get super close by customizing Crease, but it’s not 1:1
  • No transpose tool. You CAN fake it using masking, gizmo, & moving your pivot.
  • The ZRemesher alternative Quad Remesher from Exoside exists, but it is a paid add-on. That can be a deal breaker for some cash strapped users or students.
  • Fewer ways to start a given model. You can start using single primitives, (destructive) booleans, tubes, or some combination thereof. However, it’s not the same as also having poly modeling tools, live booleans, shadow box, & zspheres.

â—Źâ—ŹOBSERVATIONSâ—Źâ—Ź

  1. Sculpting is sculpting is sculpting. Yes. ZBrush has more tutorials & a large community. However, technique is portable & just about anything that you learn in one app can be moved to the next.
  2. Yes. ZBrush offers higher poly counts. However, let’s get real for a moment. That obscene level of detail is mostly reserved for ultra fine detail. Most users, even when working with really complex models, will rework their topology when they hit a certain poly count. It just makes the model more usable & system more responsive; Plus, sending it to another app when the size is more manageable makes sense. IRL, yes, ZBrush has more poly pushing power. However, in the most practical terms, it doesn’t matter. A bad artist can make a 100mil poly model look like it was made with only 10k polys. A good artist can make a 10k poly model look it was made with 100mil.
  3. Yes. ZBrush offers more brushes. However, so many of them are redundant; Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Nomad may not have 100% of the brushes you want, but it has 100% of the brushes that you need. If you can’t sculpt something using what’s been given in Nomad Sculpt then you might be doing something wron.g
  4. The scope of Nomad Sculpt & ZBrush’s ecosystems are different. ZBrush exists as part of a much larger workflow that includes Substance Painter & Designer, Photoshop, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Houdini, Unreal, etc & so on. It’s a more expensive sandbox to play in, but that’s because it caters to a more pro/studio set of needs. I’d love to have robust poly modeling, character animation, & procedural tools on iOS, but we’re not there yet. Without ever leaving the iPad, you can still accomplish a whole lot using just Affinity, Nomad Sculpt, Procreate, CozyBlanket, & Valence 3D. However, if you needed more than what that smaller, more restricted ecosystem has to offer then you have to now worry about data interchange and moving stuff over to a PC/Mac to finish or polish.

:arrow_forward: OVERALL :arrow_backward:
On iOS, I’d still choose Nomad Sculpt over ZBrush. The practical differences are nominal. The results matter more. I would certainly like some ZBrush features to make their way over to Nomad, but that’s me being nitpicky. Since I also do stuff on PC, I can move between platforms if the need arose. Even if I were forced to stay on iOS, I still wouldn’t complain about Nomad Sculpt. With a perpetual license & far more intuitive UI that lets me work faster… Yeah. ZBrush still has some catching up to do of its own. Honestly? Each app has its strengths & weaknesses. It’s really a matter of personal preferences & professional needs.

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I prefer the sculpting “feel” of nomads dyntopo.

The biggest advantage tho is the true perspective view. Zbrushs fake perspective just sucks. I get the major forms way better in nomad sculpting.

So i really hope the nomad desktop version will be released soon!

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Well done. Professionally written. Been using ZBUSH since it’s inception. I quit updates when Adobe/Maxon purchased it. I’ll stick with my perpetual license. If AI is added later to ZBrush, As a freelancer, I’ll quit the industry and move on to my other skills.

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Nomad has the shadow box thing (triplanar primitive). You can also convert to triplanar (topology menu).

But it’s probably one of the least useful feature in Nomad.
I mostly added it since at first the primitives in Nomad was very limited.

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The triplanar tool used to be my absolute favorite go to before the tube profile was introduced