Sculpting/Painting Question

Sculpting/Painting Question

Hoping someone with a bit more experience in this field can help me out...

I don't know a great deal about 3d sculpting/painting but from what I do know it's a good way to get a lot of detail into a model. I know that Zbrush is pretty much the industry standard app but what would you recommend I look at to get started? (I would like to end up using Zbrush but for now I need a budget app to get me started) I'm thinking of taking a few of my Cheetah3d models through and doing some sculpting and painting on top of them. I've seen Sculptris and also 3d Coat - can anyone give me a push in the right direction?

Or if I've got the whole concept wrong - let me know!

Sculptris is good but will triangulate your model. Blender has some pretty good sculpting features as well.

I would recommend blender for starting with. Its pretty easy when yu understand where the sculpting tools are.

That's the free ones I know of.

For me its zbrush every time with a bit of 3dcoat from time to time.

Another app I use a lot (particularly for base meshes I want to use in third party sculpting apps.) is Curvy 3d. It has some sculpting abilities.

Mike

Thanks Mike, it's an area I know nothing about. Once I kind of get to grips with it, is it a skill that I can easily transfer between other apps?

mykyl66 said:

Sculptris is good but will triangulate your model...
Mike

Click to expand...

this is one of the reasons I've been asking for a retopology tool

• I find sculptris one of the easiest... but needs rotopo...

• 3d coat is very complete, has great retopo features and is a decent texture painter (but became too expensive to my opinion, I bought it at about 30€ at the time)

• Blender (as we all know) great, free, but last time I used it (a while ago) a bit less inuïtive...

You can off course do some basic sculpting in Cheetah with the displacement modifier in combination with UV-painting (but then you need a LOT of geometry)

I'm also looking foreward to the soft selections to do more organic modeling (which I expect in one of the future releases...:-D)

If you like Sculptris, but don't want to deal with the triangulated mesh then I'd recommend just baking the displacement to a lowres mesh. I usually use Blender completely, but it would work with an imported mesh. Here are the basic steps (I can go into more detail if necessary):

1. Create a simple base mesh and import it into Sculptris. (Save this mesh as you will be importing it into Blender later.)
2. Sculpt to your heart's content in Sculptris
3. Import finished sculpt into Blender and import the original base mesh
4. Align both the finished mesh and the original base mesh so they are centered over one another.
5. Bake a displacement map from the sculpted mesh to the base mesh
6. Now you have a displacement map. If you'd like you can apply the displacement to the mesh using the displace modifier and then export the mesh at a resolution you like to then render in C3d.