Tag: Sculpting

Home / sculpting

Bouncer

Sep72011

[swfobj src=”http://simonglas.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BouncerB.swf” width=”500″ height=”500″]

Bouncer01

This bouncer is modelled in Sculptris and rendered in Cheeta. I’ve made a quick and dirty turn table viewer in flash so you can spin him around.

The purpose of this sculpt was too see how easy it is to sketch in 3D and to make a start with getting to grips with anatomy. Sculptris is really good for sketching, even better that pencil and paper I would say, cause it is very easy to change shape and volume. Especially the rearranging of volume, even while halfway through a sketch is so much easier than on paper. This way you can very quickly try out different ideas to see which is best.

Anatomy wise it was my first real foray into getting the right muscles in the right place. I think I’ve done an ok job, still there is much to improve. The hands look like shit because I’m not very good at hands. I will concentrate some more on just hands to finally understand them, but I will wait with that until my new anatomy book has arrived.

There is also a screen for people without flash.

Sculptris Head 2

Sep22011

The head was sculpted in Sculptris and retopologised in Topogun.
All the fine details as wel as some structural change were done in Zbrush.
The texture was hand painted in Zbrush, no photo’s used.

Sculptris Heads

Aug192011

Here are two quick sculpts I made during downtime at work. Both took about two hours to make.
Rendered in Cheeta, cause that was what I had with me and didn’t require left-at-home dongles or change of OS.

Sculptris

Jul72011


A couple of days ago I downloaded Sculptris, a free (for the time being?) sculpting program. I was already familiar with the program but now it is out for Mac OSX, my platform of choice. Most people know its bigger sister Zbrush, and Sculptris is in many aspects the minor but it trumps Zbrush in one, major, aspect: dynamic subdivision.
Dynamic subdivision means that Sculptris will subdivide the mesh there where you work when you need it, automatically. For me this is liberating on so many levels! First of all, you don’t have to worry about what detail to apply at what subD level. Second, no worry if your computer can handle the dense mesh since only the parts that need it get the high subdivision. Third, no more need of a base mesh, and that is a real biggy.
Zbrush already tried to eliminate the need of a base mesh with the Zspheres and Zspheres 2, but in my eye this was still limiting. You still had to do a lot of work before you could go sculpting. You could of course just get a sphere and start sculpting on that but soon you’d run into the limitations of whole-mesh subdivision, elongated polygons which limited sculpting, smoothing and detail.
The dynamic subdivision of Sculptris makes a huge difference in that regard. Not only does it take the mind off the managing of subD levels, it can actually generate geometry! As a simple example, in both Zbrush and Sculptris get a sphere and pull out the shape of a long beak of a bird. In Zbrush you’ll get elongated polygons instantly but not in Sculptis. This ‘simple’ change in approach between the two programs has a huge impact on the workflow. Sculptris really manages to make the sphere on the screen feel like digital clay.
And that, to me, is nothing short of a revolution.