Advanced Sculpty Tutorials?

[Kris Messmer]

Well I've been putting off learning to sculpt for a long time because I've always thought it was just a hacky substitute for mesh, but now I really doubt LL's ability to get mesh public anytime soon. I've been learning to sculpt but all the tutorials out there are simple "scale these edges" and the like. I'd like to see a video of someone creating something that is radically different than a cylinder or a sphere. Something that can't be made in a few minutes.

[Kornscope Komachi]

As always: Start here machinimatrix.org

One thing to remember though is you don't learn to sculpt, you learn the 3D app that outputs the sculpts.

[Kris Messmer]

Thanks, but unfortunately I've already been through those tutorials. they helped a lot but I was hoping therre was some more. Yeah I suppose you are right, sculpty creation is a littler strange though, doesn't have the freedom of normal modeling.

[Jacki Silverfall]

 

http://leezu-tutorials.blogspot.com/

[Gaia Clary]

I have been asked to do such a tutorial for many many times. I even tried some approaches but i always found the results very inconvenient. Most of the time i was simply moving edge loops and single vertices around, which i found very booring to look at.

Hence i decided to always choose very simple and easy to make builds, so that i can show the principles. And even that takes a long time. Look for instance at my first 4 machinimatrix tutorials about the top-hat. Although this is a very very simple example from the 3D-modelling viewpoint, it takes almost 60 minutes of explaining and showing what happens when you go the wrong way and how to fix things and so on...

If you want to learn how to do efficient modelling, then i realy recommend to go to your local book store and look for books about 3D modelling. My personal favorite is "3-D Human Modelling and Animation" which gives a short but very well done introduction into 3D-modelling. And it proceeds with how to make efficient human models, which i believe IS one of the more complex builds ...

Ok, then you have to map that all to sculpted prim building, which probably is the most challenging part of all ;-) But that is what we try to cover with the machinimatrix tutorials ;-)

[Josh Susanto]

My sculpts are almost entirely photoderivative. 

That is rather limiting. Nonetheless, very few people really seem to have any idea how that works.

If you want to know, ask me. It's weird, but it's no secret.

[Gaia Clary]

I am always interested to learn about new approaches... Could you explain your approach briefly ?

[Josh Susanto]

I turn color data into shape data in several ways.

Still interested?

[Gaia Clary]

yes.

[Josh Susanto]

If you're working with mesh, I don't know that there will be any compelling reason for you to stoop to my level, but the basic idea is this: many textures contain RGB data that will allow you to pull a decent shape out of them on at least one axis.

I'm using the old 092 version of Sculptypaint. If you do, be sure to prepare mirrored versions of the textures to load as surfaces. That's a major bug with SP092, but it is at least very consistent and predictable.

With spectrally simple images, I can usually pull the green up on the default red-blue plane simply by loading the green layer in from the surface texture and then playing with the frame (pulling it flat to center on green, backing it up to prevent push-through before holding it hard in smoothing and then tightening it on red and blue to make it easier to hide when rezzed, etc).

Sometimes there are shadows or highlights I need to mitigate, or just a quality of relief that doesn't pull easily in one color. Quite often I'll rotate the plane so that red will turn into green when I rotate it back, and I do the same thing with blue, but in negative. You can learn pretty quickly how to load any of the colors as the 3rd dimension in negative or positive by selecting and rotating the whole plane template. There's no reason to use green always as the relief color, but it's the default, so I tend to stick with it. For surfaces that are basically incandescent spectrum (most natural objects, for example), highlights and shine and such can be mitigated as relief elements by using their blue content in negative to flatten their red content, provided that the objects to be morphed are rotated to some position where red positive and blue negative are functioning on the same axis (as said, I like green).  Using the morph bar allows me to balance color layers to emphasize in relief depth the points of implied depth in the surface image I consider to be of most importance.

Cylinders, blocks and spheroids are a little more complicated, but only a little.

Shall I explain them?