Pigmi vs ZBrush

Pigmi is a desktop editor for texture palettes, gradient atlases, and PBR material maps. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with a Free plan priced at free. Gradient tools include linear, radial, and conic forms, stepped rows and columns, RGB or HSL interpolation, editable color stops, and opacity. Palette elements can sit in nested folders and support multi-selection, ordering, visibility, isolation, copy and paste, plus name search. Material controls cover albedo, roughness, metallic, emission, clearcoat, and clearcoat roughness. Enabled maps export as PNG or WebP, and Pigmi can create a packed MRC map while synchronizing document edits with exports. Palette generation uses Huemint and preserves locked stops. Optional Blender add-ons handle palette UV mapping, vertex-color painting, and mesh attachments. A local STDIO MCP adapter supports compatible AI clients and requires Node.js. Editing and exporting are local; generation sends constraints to Huemint.

ZBrush is a 3D sculpting and modeling application with desktop and iPad offerings. Its listed tools include sculpting, parametric modeling, animation, rendering and 3D print export. Desktop is listed for Windows and macOS, while a separate supported-platform list also includes Linux. The desktop plan includes ZBrush for iPad and advanced sculpting, modeling, rendering and export tools. Rendering is described as hybrid, with GPU and animation rendering and denoising. Listed workload areas include CPU and GPU rendering, ray tracing, shader execution and geometry processing. Other listed capabilities include rotoscoping, 3D camera tracking, custom test profiles and CLI or automation support. The listed result export formats are none documented, and results are not saved as a file. Headquarters are listed as both Bad Homburg vor der Höhe and Friedrichsdorf, Germany; the maker is listed as founded in 1986.