Drawing/Building forms upon on a surface of an existing mesh??

Support Modeling
#1

Hey guys

Asked this on the Sculptris forum as well… I guess its not possible there…

I bet it can be done here though…

So the idea is to be able to build up and draw forms upon the surface of one pre-draw mesh, in a way that the ‘build up’ ‘clay’ would copy the surface, so when I put it aside, the form would be an inversion of the inital mesh/object (which would obviously be left intact)
Is it actually possible to kind of just build up ‘blobs of clay’ just out of nowhere?

So the issue is threefold>

  1. Being able to build these ‘blobs’ (or just being able to grab and mold a shape/mesh)
  2. So the ‘build up’ copies the surface
  3. How to lock/freeze a mesh, which I will google right now. hah.

I really hope you guys know what I mean, this would be just a fantastic way to use both Sculptris and Blender and most of all, it would be fantastic for casting, where both of these meshes could be cast with different materials/colour/variations…

Is this an interesting question or what?

Cheers,
P.

#2

When you say “an inversion of the original object” I’m not sure what you mean. If you want something like a negative impression of the object, like you would get if you pushed a hard object into clay, a boolean would do that.

As for grabbing and molding a mesh, that sounds like sculpt mode.

#3

Well… imagine a rock with a crease, you take a clay and press onto the surface of the rock and fill the crease.

If I’d just use boolean, I would be able to get the negative of the rock/crease [on the bottom side], but the ‘clay’ would not have the information, or the overall shape of the rock. Know what I mean?

Untitled.png700×600 35.5 KB

I could make a duplicate of the rock, sculpt on that and do boolean, but it would make things so much easier [and fun!] if I could ‘lock’ the rock and build up forms on that, which would mimick the surface of the rock … (and obviously, end up with two separate meshes)

I guess its not implented in Blender, just trying to maybe figure out/thinking aloud here, maybe someone will think of something… I really think it would be an interesting feature… I guess its not possible to just build up forms out of thin air (the way you would use paint) …

#4

I guess metaball is really close to what I mean, they do not mimick the surface/form of an ‘outside’ object though, I guess …

Maybe something like a cast mod would work, which is not available for metaballs …