I just downloaded and tried sculptris. It's freakin amazingly easy to use.
I have no clue yet how to render anything in it or I would post a pic. Suffice to say that I've made a female bust in about 10 minutes (fast for me). This was with no reading of documentation. It's got a great easy to understand interface that was simply intuative.
Give it a try while it's still free.
http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/
BTW betwen finding this software and doing the Noob Learning Challenge I'm not going to get any homework done. I feel like a kid on Christmas morning
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In terms of rendering I think the options for it are in it's Options menu, which you access on the big button near the top of the interface.
The interface in sculptris is so much easier to use than zbrush though. I hope pixologic really learn something from it.
But here's a pic of something I made a while ago in it. (from the WAYWO thread)
bust of pallas/athena by sprunghunt, on Flickr
Yeah, but it's free, that's very important for those that can't afford Zbrush.
It also has some of the best smoothing controls in 3d art, thanks to the decimate/optimize brush, you can easily crunch an area down hard and smooth it to obliterate detail.
Some of my older/shittier sculpts were in it:
[1] [2]
http://www.drpetter.se/project_sculpt.html
Who was subsequently hired by pixologic to work on I can imagine dynamesh (speculation - I don't really know).
And they bought up sculptris in the process.
first human & first sculpt in one go as you would say
sry for the quality, had to go way down with the quality because of filesize =(
i might get used to it
I think it's a little unfair to say this, Sculptris was created by a single person as a free software with a limited set of tools, I mean there is literally a couple of tools at hand, and extra ones cannot be made or saved. Simplicity is the keyword here.
ZB on the other hands has a plethora of tools, which can be very easily customized in the UI as you see fit, hence why they need to be hidden, because unlike Sculptris, they cannot be exposed to the user without flooding the screen.
I understand that ZB looks daunting to work with, and even a few years in it, it still is, but you can almost customized everything in the UI, taking off an afternoon or two to bring up the shortcuts and UI in a way that you want isn't too hard, nor should be an issue.
Still, I think Sculptris is indispensable for anyone who is working with free tools a la Blender.
I would agree with this sentiment. Sculptris' simplicity makes it more user-friendly for inexperienced digital sculptors. But it also hampers what can be done with the tool. Many of its professional competitors wipe the floor with it in terms of features. The advantages of Sculptris are the dynamic mesh tessellation, the simplicity, and the price.
Of course, this makes it a fine tool for less experienced indie developers who just need to get some quick, decent models for normal-map baking. More robust sculptors would probably opt for Z-Brush or Mudbox, but there is definitely a place for Sculptris among indie developers.
If you are doing a character and you want folds, limbs, anything that could easily become compromised by dynamesh (such as anything overlapping or in proximity), then you don't want to dynamesh. I'd say with Qremesher now on the table, a good approach would be to rough things out and get good forms and volumes in Sculptris (specifically for organics), and use Qremesher to get the sculpting topology (subdividable, clean for sculpting). If you decided to take the Sculptris level of detail a bit further it's easy enough to project that detail onto your new subdividable topology; the important thing is that the forms are still there and not overly generalized and merged.
I'll see how many polies it can take this weekend and report back.