3D modeling with your iPhone
With the ever increasing power and improvement with technology, smart phones are able to push more pixels and more polies with each generation. What does this mean to us as 3D Artists? Well it means we can have 3D modeling packages like the iSculptor app for the iPhone.
iSculptor is a 3D modeling application developed by Lost Pencil (an animation and digital art studio) for the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad, which allows you to create and modify your own 3D models.
What makes this app even cooler is that you are able to import and export your 3D meshes in and out of the iSculptor application as an OBJ file. The only drawback is that you have to use a Mac only application called iSculptorNet (which is free). Lost Pencil are working on a Windows based version of iSculptorNet, but in the meantime, both Windows and Mac users are able to e-mail the files via the application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS2iYGenh3Y
iSculptor in action.
iSculptor Features:
- full unlimited undo capability (undo camera rotation, pan, zoom, 3d element selection, and model editing)
- rotate, pan, zoom camera
- limit camera rotation to 45 degree increments for simulation of front, side, back, and top views
- individual selection of vertices and polygons (additive selection mode)
- marquee selection of vertices
- convert vertex selection to polygons and polygon selection to vertices
- grow polygon selection
- move vertices and polygons (along the view plane or along polygon normals)
- align vertices
- merge vertices
- split polygon loop
- triangulate, quadrangulate
- extrude polygons (combined and individual)
- scale polygons or vertex selections
- perspective or orthographic mode
- wireframe or shaded view
- models can be made up of different mesh pieces, but all of them must conform to the model limitations
The iSculptor application does have some limitations, such as only supporting tris and quads, a soft limit of 2500 tris in the scene, and a few others that can be found on their site.
A full list of tutorial videos can be found here which will give you a good indication of what the application is capable of and how it performs certain modeling functions.
For more information, tutorials and support visit the Lost Pencil official website.
As an artist, how useful woud you find an application like this on your phone?
Replies
I guess this still could be useful if you see something cool that you want to block out quickly, but I don't see too much use for this.
- Up to around 30k polygons on the scene
- Being able to load textures
- Different light setups
- Zoom / panning / rotating
- Wireframe mode with and without texture overlayed
- Controls that actually work (there are a few apps that let you load .OBJ models but they are horrible and the controls are an incredible mess)
And hopefully some extra stuff like support for a specular and normal map, being able to save setups for the models, etc..
I'd pay this same price for it.