SCULPTRIS
mod
Pixologic released SCULPTRIS, its free, its Zbrush's little brother, you should check it out
Pixologic has been working on this for a while and if you haven't been following it through beta testing you should know that Sculptris is a lighter quicker re-imagining of Zbrush that aims to make the users experience not so nightmarish as Zbrush can be. Think of it as training wheels for Zbrush. Sculptris puts an emphasis on sculpting triangulated meshes (get it, sculp-tris) which has been a bit of a problem for some sculpting apps in the past.
The best part is, its free, so go check it out and tell us what you think.
Replies
It's light and quick!
Gets the job done fast.
It's so intuitive I don't think you need to read the manual!
Has all the basic things you need for a small yet powerful sculpting package!
...or you can buy zbrush and have more power and a huge variety of tools, but it'll cost you some bux!
The first is the ability to extrude shapes -endlessly-, meaning you can take a sphere and make a full character out of it with limbs and everything, without ever running out of polys at the extremities. It creates new polygons right where you sculpt!
The second is that you can have different resolutions on different areas of the mesh. No need to ever subdivide the entire mesh when you only want to detail a small part, just set the brush itself to a higher res and, again, it will create the needed polygons where you sculpt. This seems really efficient to me and could help keep filesizes down.
Of course not having quads and a proper poly flow could cause other problems I imagine, but someone with more knowledge on the subject than me might be better qualified to talk about that.
I know i'm not one to speak about such programs, then again its because i'm still stuck self teaching myself in 3ds max due to the fact that most people are cheap bastards and will teach you for thousands if not your life's worth in currency.
Though i do wish to give my condolences and thank whoever had provided such a tool for free usage.
l8s
Re: is it worth it?
Extremely. Personally I like it better than zbrush or mudbox. With zbrush I still wind up fighting the interface and workflow as much as I do sculpting anything. Mudbox slows down far to quickly on my machine. Sculpts however stays efficient by not wasting detail. So I can keep a low tricount, and a responsive machine and get detail where I need it.
It is feature limited, but that is because it's a specialized tool. If you need a few screwdrivers why get a whole craftsman industrial toolbox?
A big draw for me is the more clay-like nature of it. Suddenly need horns? Mask grab and pull, and you can still detail them without retooling your basemesh. Course there aren't layers or multiple subdivision levels. :shrug:
oh and joshua, is that that art thief guy's face in that woman? lol
Also @Teriyaki - oh yeah! well back in my day we had to sculpt while walking up-hill, both ways, in the snow, all on tablets called sin-teeks which had a 10 lb ball and chain attached to it called a tau-er which we would drag using cables...you kids and your wireless these days!!
I really don't think we can ever compare Sculptris to ZBrush or even Mudbox. ZB and MB are sculpting apps, made for production, and that's why workflows are more specific and sharp around them.
Sculptris is really like a sketchbook, just take you pen, a piece of white paper and go ahead, give yourself some fun. Don't even think of technical constrain.
"Wow it's cool, extruding shapes endlessly!", it's such a trap, and I know we're going to have a lot sh** and a lot of "3D Modeler wanna be" spread their sh** around forums more than ever.
Every sculpts I've saw since the start of sculptris were a way too muddy and it's because of this. It's not easy to do something sharp with this app, whereas ZBrush allow focussing on very basic shapes at a low res step.
However, I really don't think I can giving up ZSpheres or "base meshing" in my production workflow, for Sculptris. I'll use it, but for personnal stuff, like sketchin' on a scrapbook.
@Zoidburg - yeah that is a business model that would work but I think a lot of people would complain, I saw a mod on here a while back and on ModDB the creator had decided they would rather sell it since they were putting more work in than planned. It became a total sh**storm after that and it was ridiculous how unappreciative people can be sometimes.
With this, it was like mudbox it just worked and I didn't need massive tutorials, notes, videos and mentors to get me over the learning hump. I really look forward to using this more. Although I doubt it will dethrone Mudbox in my workflow, I really enjoy this and I hope they incorporate more of these features in Zbrush, not only the easy to use UI but the smart sub-division of surfaces WITHOUT some crazy workflow.