Basic sculpting program?

[Suki Hirano]

For the past few months I was mainly working on poses and animations. Now I want to try doing some basic sculpted work. Can anyone recommend to me what's the best program for a beginner sculptie creator? I'm fairly experienced in Photoshop but have no experience in 3D. It needs to have a newbie-friendly interface, and doesn't have to be advanced as I just want to create some boots and heels, so programs like 3DMax or Maya won't be appropriate for my use.

Thanks.

[Knowl Paine]

It's an older Torley Linden video for scultypaint, a free?? download. Not sure how up to date it is.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Sculptypaint is indeed free and still available:  http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/ with video tutorials here:  http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/tuto/index.html

If you want to take a bit bigger leap, there is a "special version" of Blender called Jass that includes some remarkable capabilities, including the ability to generate an lsl script that you place in a prim inworld along with your final sculpty textures.   The script then assembles your multi-sculpty object right before your eyes.  

The basic version is available for what I believe is a voluntary contribution through an inworld site.   (Search "Jass".)  Gaia Clary's tutorials at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/ are positively wonderful.   Though Blender can be a bit intimidating, Gaia's tutorials -- especially if you can put the tutorial up on one screen and have Jass running on another so you can work along with the videos -- will have you creating AND understanding stuff really quickly.   (Now you know why you have a laptop AND a desktop!)  Making basic sculpties like what you want really isn't that hard in Blender.  If you have achieved at least an intermediate level with Photoshop -- using layers, say -- you can learn to use Blender/Jass.  If you do, you'll be ready for mesh when it debuts.

Either program will get you going, though.

 

 

[Claireschen Hesten]

i would say give sculpty paint a shot it's what i use if i had to sum it up i'd call it sculpting for dummies you can start sculpting straight away but it's vital you test the sculpts you've saved first either with a viewer with free temp uploads or on the beta grid because many a time i've created a sculpt that looked great in sculpty paint and it looked horrible in SL. i recently discovered another free sculpting tool called plopSL it's very simple to use looks like the kind of paint program a toddler would use all you need is to be good at drawing it will make a sculpt and a colour texture at the same time, the sculpt can't have holes in it they won't show in SL

[Honey Puddles]

 

---

Suki Hirano wrote:

For the past few months I was mainly working on poses and animations. Now I want to try doing some

basic sculpted work

. Can anyone recommend to me what's the best program for a

beginner sculptie creator

? I'm fairly experienced in Photoshop but have no experience in 3D. It needs to have a newbie-friendly interface, and

doesn't have to be advanced

as I

just want to create some boots and heels

, so programs like 3DMax or Maya won't be appropriate for my use.

Thanks.

---

 

Well you've certainly got advanced ambitions for a beginner. :smileyhappy:

 

Sculpting things isn't super easy, I say that as someone for whom most art forms lay down like a lover. Most programs that can create sculpted prims, are either VERY complicated, or can only create rudimentary shapes. There's really no inbetween. The more capabilities a program has in regards to sculpted prims.. the more complex it becomes to use.

I can't speak for programs that I myself haven't used. I've tried Blender and Maya, but found neither easy to use (in contrast, I am self taught in photoshop and Illustrator, and successfully challenged those course requirements in college). I plan to spend several months learning to use Blender, simply because it is one of the most commonly used modelling programs these days.

 

The programs I have used for making sculpted prims are as follows:

Rokuro (free/donation)

• This program is simply awesome. If you want to make a simple, lathed sculpt, this is the right tool for the job. It's simple, non-nonsense interface takes seconds to learn. The program natively supports exporting to sculpts, but it only does lathed, 32x32 sculpts. It's a one trick pony, but it's perfect at doing that one thing.

Tokoroten (free/donation)

• Made by the creator of Rokuro, Tokoroten is a simple "extrusion" tool. Once again, this tool is perfect at what it does, and is super simple to use. Want to make a cube? draw a square. Want to make a Cylander? draw a circle. Once again, Tokoroten is limited to 32x32 sculpts.

Sculpty Paint (free/donation)

• I frequently typo Sculpty Paint as "Sculpty Pain"... and that's pretty apt with this program's UI. Don't get me wrong, SP is a fantastic accomplishment, but it is a early beta program that hasn't seen any development in a couple of years. SP lets you take an existing sculpt map, and edit it, as well as allowing you to morph it with other sculpts, add noise, stretch, rotate, and smooth. IT's really a deceptively powerful program, but I've only been able to find uses for it's simpler functions. Namely fixing rotations on sculpts, smoothing out distortions, making soft rounded cubes, etc.. Like the others above, SP only supports 32x32 sculpts, but it does allow you to export your creations as OBJ meshes.

Sculpt Studio (L$4999)

• This is my favourite tool. Simply, my favourite. Sculpt Studio is an inworld tool that defines a sculpted prim as a series of "slices". (imagine a sphere defined as 32 "rings" from top to bottom). Each ring can be moved, rotated, and scaled, and each ring can be "opened" and each of the 32 points in the ring can be adjusted as well. Sculpt Studio supports oblong sculpts, which means you can make long ribbons of 128 slices, or a short sculpt with highly detailled rings. This program supports a LOT of stuff.. including saving as sculpt, and as OBJ. The biggest problems with Sculpt Studio are A) it doesn't support texturing of any kind, and B) using it requires a lot of prims, a lot of sim resources, and it can be very slow to create even simple shapes.

Pixologic ZBrush ($699)

• This program is fantastic for advanced sculpting. It has capabilities for doing texturing, and can work with sculpted prims, and very high detailled meshes. It is NOT an easy user interface to learn, and to be honest, I've only pecked it's capabilities on the surface... but I don't use it too often. ZBrush does not natively support saving to sculpts, but there are some resources on the web from people who have done it before.

[Honey Puddles]

There's also this 9-part Sculpty Paint tutorial.. but it focuses on Sculpty Paint 0.92 (the version before the last one). So a few minor things have changed (like how to load an existing sculpt, which you do by drag and drop now).

 

[Crim Mip]

I like Sculpt Studio. For the sculpties I make, it's far faster than loading up some external 3d software and made a lot more sense to me than the others I tried. That said, you'll have to invest some time learning it. There are some good online tutorials to get you started and the creators of the software have regular in world classes in how to use it.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

 

---

Suki Hirano wrote:

 I'm fairly experienced in Photoshop but have no experience in 3D. It needs to have a newbie-friendly interface, and doesn't have to be advanced as I just want to create some boots and heels.

---

 

About two years ago I was in the same position as you are now. I was skilled with PS, and had no experiencen in 3D at all. I gave SculptyPaint a try, but it's very limited. When you want to make boots and heels, it will be too limited for you.

I started working with Blender. The best of it is that it's open source, you can use it for free. The first stepts in Blender are difficult, because you have no clue what to do. You can compare the difficulty with Max3D and Maya. But don't let this frighten you. With some patience and study you will start finding your way around in a few weeks. Start by following tutorials. Pratice a lot, the more you practise with the program, the more you are going to understand of it.

Like someone else already said: there is no easy route to 3D creation. Or you want to learn it, and then you have to invest time. Or you want an easy ride, in that case you better buy some full perms boots and heels on the marketplace.

I think Blender is the best program for a beginner, not the easiest program but far out the best.