>>107861>he fell for the blender memenigga what are you doing.
If total novice, and want very gradual learning progression:
Wings 3D -> Metasequoia -> 3ds Max 2012 SP2 or Maya 2016 SP6 -> ZBrush
Already know basics of box modeling and UV unwrapping, and want gradual learning progression:
Metasequoia -> 3ds Max 2012 SP2 or Maya 2016 SP6 -> ZBrush
If you're not planning on doing any fancy animations, Metasequoia is enough, you can make almost everything with it.
The choice of 3ds Max or Maya depends on whether you want to focus more on hard surface modeling (or you just prefer a non-destructive modeling workflow) or animation.
The latest version of Metasequoia can be found on 1337x.to, and those Autodesk versions can be found on rutracker (search with yandex).
Metasequoia is used and recommended by Japanese modelers and DeviantArt girls especially within the MikuMikuDance (MMD) community.
I side with the DeviantArt girls over the Blender Redditors on this one.
Avoid newer Autodesk versions, they are garbage for many reasons (e.g. much higher RAM usage and startup times for no productive gain for the average person).
Maya 2022.5 is arguably better than 2016 SP6 but only if you have at least 32 GB of RAM because cached playback can be helpful with the animation workflow, but that feature requires a lot of RAM.
Don't bother installing renderers like Mental Ray, V-ray, Arnold et al., unless you really are a rendercuck who enjoys twiddling his thumbs waiting for several hours to render slop.
I don't have patience for that shit, playblast videos from 3ds Max or Maya are good enough quality.
Playblast examples: youtube.com/watch?v=KvY8hEA2FFU youtube.com/watch?v=IlEa96Kusn8
If you really want to do something fancy, green screen the background in the playblast and composite it with After Effects 2020 or Davinci Resolve Studio 14.3. Anyway, I don't know if you care about animations.
ZBrush, which is used together with 3ds Max or Maya, should only be learned after you're proficient with modeling and UV unwrapping.
You take normal & ambient occlusion texture maps from the higher poly model sculped by ZBrush and project them onto your lower poly model retopo'd by 3ds Max or Maya to give it the illusion that it's higher poly and detailed.
If you care to know, Morrowind had some minimal use of hand-painted bump maps to give some depth to various surfaces.
With Oblivion, they simply subdivided their models to create higher poly "source" models to take normal maps from. Normal maps are like bump maps but they look better at more angles.
I suspect ESO (2014) or Fallout 4 (2015) is when ZeniMax started using Zbrush to create higher poly models to take normal & AO maps from. Use of Zbrush or Mudbox didn't become standard by game studios until the 2010s.
