Sculptris – wonders of the free world
Posted by TJunkers on Jul 25, 2010 in 3D News | 1 comment
SCULPTRIS – A NEW SCULPTING SOFTWARE EGG HAS HATCHED TO BE PERFECTLY FREE!
Created by Tomas Petterson, alias DrPetter, this free sculpting tool is making quite a splash with the release of version 1.01 already. Developed for his own enjoyment- as he claims- he enjoyed perfect freedom to do as he pleases, which allowed him to jam pack this little gem with plenty of innovations both under the hood and right before your eyes. Its clean and simple interface is instantly inviting and reflects the character of the workflow immediately. I personally can’t remember ever having seen such a self-explanatory interface for something as complex as digital sculpting, but that’s merely the beginning…
Simply sculpting, no required premeditation, no worries and everything you need, if you’re in the mood for some powerful and direct freeform 3d sketching with adaptively subdividing geometry (triangle based) right underneath your brush as you sculpt and including painting colors, bumps and even alpha blended materials all on automatically created UVmaps at image resolutions up to 4096 in a dedicated paint mode.
I could write about all the details, but it couldn’t do justice to simply experiencing it yourself. But here’s a word of warning: You may realize that this is meant to be just a toy, play around with it a bit, drive it straight to its limits and believe it can’t be a serious tool, but by that time you’ll already have been infected. I wouldn’t be writing about this, if it hadn’t already eaten itself into my artistic heart and mind. I also wouldn’t be writing about this, if there was any agenda tied to it other than the phenomenal spirit of its creator to share his pure and honest fun with everyone. I’d like to add "his genius", but you’ll figure that out yourselves. Go to…
Watch the trailer, if you like, download the zip (yes, it’s just a zip, nothing to install, just copy the stuff into a folder and off you go!) and hopefully you’ll soon consider joining the forum there to share some of your experiments, happily leech the resource sharing subforum, check out the tutorial- and demovideos and begin complaining in the technical sub about why he’s not adding that little bit of extra that hooks it snuggly into your pipeline. Then check out the tips’n'tricks of others about how they do it already!
Frankly, I personally don’t even care about how it would fit into a pipeline or helps with a job or any of this. It’s my new favorite 3d doodle tool and I haven’t been doodling that much ever before. It’s fantastic to study aspects of sculptures, anatomy, proportions and wild forms with no hesitations and few restrictions. You may want to revisit your understanding of how many details should go into a geometry and what structures can be added as bump, as it’s not a 20million polygon zbrush beast, but a smoothly implemented adaptive geometry modeler that gets you brilliantly detailed shapes without the immediate need of such high amounts of polygons.
To show you what I’m talking about, here’s a little sketch I did this morning right with my first coffee. Something tells me, you’ll be able to imagine my situation then. Sculptris can export color (8bit png) and bump (16bit tif) images. I usually take them into Adobe’s After Effects for a quick depth of field and mild fog treatment. Takes roughly 20seconds to hook together and be done with it. Here it goes:
However, I’ve already created geometry in Sculptris up until a certain point and then took it into Zbrush for final details and the generation of a displacement map and it works quite beautifully. If you don’t mind doing a bit of retopologizing, Sculptris essentially replaces the use of Zspheres in a way they could never keep up with. However, in no way does it replace or even scratch Zbrush, well, maybe a bit of scratching here and there, but it already makes an excellent addition for those, who care.
I sincerely hope you will find the same kind of simple joy in Sculptris that I have found and continue to discover everyday. Just one more little thing, it took us, the entire beta team, two weeks to convince Tomas to add the Donate button to his website. He really didn’t want to hear about it, but he’s just the kind of guy, who more than deserves support to get some reward beyond the amazing art he’s triggering with this and maybe even the little chance to continue with his free spirit, showing the big boys what the future can look like.
HAPPY SCULPTING!
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