Sculptris

[Bucket]

The 3d market is flooded with sculpting applications. These are tools that are meant to mimic clay but have some major short comings in terms of flexibility. Modo, silo, mudbox, hexagon and many others have problems in the area of mesh extrusion.

There are a few sculpting applications that try to remedy this problem.

The most recent version of zbrush does this with zspheres. Only problem with this method is that generates awful topology in a somewhat cube grid fashion. Often times this type of topology is not even good for sculpting. Alas another problem with this method is that when the user wants to begin sculpting. They are at the point of no return. The user cannot add or adjust zspheres for a mesh that has been turned into a polyTool object.

3dcoat has voxel sculpting. It's a very powerful method for sculpting except for one problem. Speed. On a high resolution mesh sculpting is so slow that it is unproductive. Just sculpting with a brush with a large radius causes speed issues. I have tried voxel sculpting on a quad core machine with cuda support. It doesn't take long to hit the wall.



Now we have another tool. The creator, Tomas Pettersson, calls it Sculptris. The mesh topology will actually change in areas that the user sculpts. It has great potential, assuming it doesn't become abadonware.

http://drpetter.se/project_sculpt.html

[Star_Trails]

This is really interesting.

Have you tried it? If so, how do you like it.

One picture that showed a mesh with a bunch of triangles. Says that it will provide additional detail where necessary, it builds polys as you go?

[Bucket]

Yeah I've tried it. It's pretty cool. It'll add polys where you need them and there is a tool simplify the mesh and remove detail. The reason why that's a big deal is because other applications require the user to subdivide the entire mesh to allow more contorl. Sculptris doesn't force that on the user. It's very straightforward. It's not loaded with crazy features. It runs pretty fast all the time. I'm hoping he will put in some alternative navigation. You can pan and rotate by using the spacebar in conjunction with lmb and rmb. Zoom in and out is done with the scroll wheel. I also don't like the button menus, they seem to be inspired by the mac buttons. But because the buttons are so small. It's actually pretty annoying although it is a cool effect. It could probably use some more brushes but I'd pretty content if he just fixed the buttons and navigation.

Anyone can try the alpha version of sculptris. He's not charging money for it. It's a small file only 880k, it's on his web page. You can give dr peter feedback on his forum concerning sculptris as well as feature suggestions. It doesn't need to be installed. It should run when you double click the file. The only problem some have have noticed. Some anti virus software will view sculptris as a threat and remove the program as soon as it is unzipped. It's been confirmed that those av apps are giving a false positive. With that said, I don't get to play with sculptris as much as I would like to. I don't like turning off my av software just to use one application. And I'd rather not mess with the permissions in my av software to prevent the false positive.


If you want.. When I have some free time. I can make a video showing the differences between 3dcoat voxel sculpting's, sculptris, and zbrush.

[The Draykin]

That would be great!

[Star_Trails]

I'm going to look at Sculptris tonight, and see how that goes.

I don't have zbrush and just discovered Mudbox.

But a video would be nice when you have a chance.

[Bucket]

He has a new website. It's still free. He just asks for donations to support his efforts. Latest version has some nice detailing features.

http://www.sculptris.com/index.html

[Bucket]

Welp, Pixologic bought out scupltris and hired Tomas Pettersson.. And they already put the Pixologic logo on Sculptris.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=090617

"For the past 10 years Pixologic, and the award winning ZBrush, has been recognized for its ground breaking innovation, ‘cool’ creativity and enabling artists to open new vistas of possibility with their skills and imagination.

Our focus and intention has always been to create and share innovative, user friendly, yet powerful tools that help artists intuitively enjoy and freely harness their creative talents, as exemplified by the plethora of top artist testimonies, brilliant artwork and application in blockbuster movies and games, and of course, the fantastic images that surrounds us all here at ZBrushCentral.

We hope you are as excited as we are about the converging versions of ZBrush 4 for Win and Mac to be released imminently on 8/9/10.

Consistent with this ethos and spirit to help you, the artist, unleash the creative beast within, we are currently developing other exciting future products.

As a taste of things to come, Pixologic would also like to give you a little appetizer ‘goodie’, an Alpha version of Sculptris for Windows - a unique, very ‘cool’ artistic modeling application still in raw baby stage and now incubating at Pixologic HQ.
The current version, formerly known as Sculptris 1.02, will be renamed under Pixologic banner as Sculptris Alpha 5.

Sculptris is the brainchild of the bright programmer Tomas Pettersson. Sculptris has captured the hearts of artists with its fun, intuitive and user-friendly interface - indeed a perfectly sweet companion to our big monster ZBrush! Tomas will be moving to California, from Sweden, to join our team. It is our pleasure to welcome Tomas and we look forward to a fruitful collaboration on future Pixologic projects.

If you enjoy ZBrushing, we are sure you’ll appreciate this!

Try it out, play with it, have fun, make some great artwork and share your art with us in the newly open Sculptris forum here in ZBrushCentral. This new forum will enable Sculptris artists to share and communicate with other Sculptris users, as well as other leading artists who frequent ZBrushCentral.


Enjoy the journey!

The Pixologic team"

[Bucket]

Sculptris Alpha 6 released. It's free. And there is a mac version this time as well. Of all the sculpting applications available, sculptris is still my favorite. It flows very nicely. Highly recommended for sculpting.

http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/