What sculpty program to use as a beginner sculpter?

[Guerlin Idlemind]

Hi.: I am looking for a good new user-friendly sculpty program to use. I have realized Blender is way too complicated for me at this point, but would like to make sculpties in 2ndlife.

I realize this is a mesh forum, but thought some of you might have good ideas about what program to try. So far I've tried Archipelis designer, tokoroten and sculptypaint but I find them a bit limited.

 

Kind regards,

[hibit Spad]

That's the trade off you make Guerlin.  Simpler program means more limits on what it will do. 

 

There are two programs inworld that will allow you to make sculpts inworld. 

Both can be found on marketplace. 

One allows you to make you object in prims and then it wraps around those prims and converts the shape to a sculpt.  I can never remember the name of this one.

The other one is more powerful but not everyone appreciates the user interface.  This is called Sculpt Studio.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

If all you ever want to make is sculpties, the inworld tools are good. However, if you want to eventually get to blender and its ilk, then you might want to look at a "simpler" offline tool. I personally started making sculpts with wings3d (before the inworld tools were available)

Following that approach with whatever basic tool takes your fancy and has a plugin or other easy method to export a sculpt map will have you learning (without really trying) about important modelling concepts like edge loops, and if/when you end up making meshes you'll not be confused by things like the importer doubling your vertex count at hard edges because you'll be used to the practice of collapsing a couple together to achieve that with a sculpt...

The only real issue with blender is its UI and the latest version of it seems like it would be a lot easier to get used to for somebody who hasnt used it before. For sculpts you'll only be using a fraction of its capabilities anyway and the more esoteric parts of the UI will be parts you'll never touch.

You'll know when you're ready to start building meshes or to switch over to blender (or similar) for sculpts when you find yourself running into things that whatever basic tool you picked can't do or that the base geometry of a sculpt wont let you accomplish. By then the learning curve of the blender UI will seem worth it Just dont even think of trying sculpts in blender without Gaia and Domino's plugins. You can do it but the hoops you have to jump through to make a sculpt map without 'em are enough to make even an experienced blender users head ache.

[Olyphaunt Offcourse]

Personally at this point I wouldn't bother with sculpts unless I had some reason to need a sculpt specifically. They're so much more of a pain in the ass to make than a normal mesh model, there's so many modeling that you use when making a sculpt...

That being said, Blender is very intimidating to start with but I can't recommend it enough. It's free and is capable of pretty much anything you could possibly want to do with a mesh. Any other program as capable as Blender is going to easily run you a couple hundred bucks... if I recall correctly most of the more popular 3D programs are over 400$ to purchase.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

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Olyphaunt Offcourse wrote:

Personally at this point I wouldn't bother with sculpts unless I had some reason to need a sculpt specifically. They're so much more of a pain in the ass to make than a normal mesh model, there's so many modeling that you use when making a sculpt...

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I couldnt agree more about the pain in the fundament factor, however at the moment I still make both. The "projects" - where I'm really stretching myself and exploring the limits of my own abilities and knowledge, those are all mesh now. However, the results of those aint gonna see the windlight of the day outside of my workshop or an occasional test elsewhere for a while. If I'm making something for the group I RP in, then it's still sculpties all the way so that the folks who cant run a mesh-enabled viewer dont get the immersion-breaker of the "hockey puck" effect. Same for stuff I make that others are going to use in the general SL market, unless I'm specifically asked to make it mesh. We haven't hit the mesh penetrance "tipping point" yet, and we can't really predict it's arrival although I think the promised backport of mesh visibility to phoenix is going to be a major factor when it hits the grid.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Olyphaunt Offcourse wrote:

if I recall correctly most of the more popular 3D programs are over 400$ to purchase.

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You can add a zero and then some for the professional ones

[Guerlin Idlemind]

Thank you all for your input and ideas. Greatly appreciated.

[Claireschen Hesten]

you might want to search for sculpty paint it's free and a hell of a lot easier to use than blender you can start it up for the first time and immediately sculpt something once you've made something you do have to test the sculpts inworld either with a viewer that does free temp uploads or go on beta grid before committing to a L$10 permanent upload because what looks good in sculpty paint doesn't always look as good inworld