Dyntopo tests

Thanks. You schould definitely try creature sculpting. For me it is a nice change and very relaxing experience to work without being restricted by references, realistic anatomy or anything really.

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Well that’s a bit of problem for me since I lack imagination of fantastic creatures. I will definitely challenge myself soon. Happy blending!

Another day another practice.

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20181109_204340

Touched up in photoshop.

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Daily doodle.

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Man I have to get more disciplined with anatomy studies, your sketches look great! I’m always doodling beasts, demons and monsters heads :stuck_out_tongue:
BTW, here’s a little creature I did last night, my son was “art directing” and I was just following his directions. It’s an interesting exercise :slight_smile:

So guys… I just read this post from @0rAngE sketchbook thread, and I think this is something we should definitely try, Zacharias Reindhart already mentioned it before on one of his youtube videos and it sparked a conversation on twitter where many showed interest in crowdfunding a campaign for the sculpt tools in Blender. In general I think there’s enough interest in the community right now to pull it off.
Plus, the recent tutorials from Jama Jurabaev have been turning a lot of heads towards Blender, even Ryan Kingslien, who is I think the biggest Zbrush evangelist has been playing with dyntopo!

Oh! also, there has been some improvements already thanks to Pablo Dobarro, who is adding some goodies to the sculpt cursor. And the change to use OpenSubdiv internally in 2.8 should also improve Multiresolution sculpting.

What do you think?
With all the changes and improvements being made for 2.8 I think is time to push for some improvements on the sculpting department as well

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@julperado

Thank you for the encouragement. I love that you and your son could create art together! My daughters like drawing but not at all interested in 3d sculpting. Not yet I hope. :grin:

If there is a crowdfunding to vastly improve blender sculpting I would gladly chip in. I am hooked :+1:

Well, for there to be a crowdfunding effort there has to be a consensus first, as well as a green light from the BF, Ton specifically.
I know the devs are aware there’s still much improvement to be done and have mentioned it before, but the plan and the actual effort to bring this topic to their attention must come from us, the users who are using sculpting tools everyday and that also know how sculpting works in other programs.

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I fully second this. I also use Zbrush, and it has a lot of tools I miss in Blender, but despite that I just love Blender’s Dyntopo. Here’s my list of things I miss in Blender’s Sculpt Mode:

• An alternate smooth brush mode that preserves volume.
• A general smoothing tool to auto-smooth a complete mesh or a masked area (in stead of having to add and apply a Smooth modifier each time).
• A general mask blur option, in stead of having to smooth the edges of each mask manually.
• Easy extraction of masked areas into a new geometry layer with a desired amount of thickness (now you need a separate add-on for that).
• The ability to manipulate unmasked parts like selections in Edit Mode: being able to move/rotate/scele those parts with a transform gizmo.
• More options to establish mask shapes, like a circular mask.
• Topological sculpting (like the Move Topological brush in ZBrush). Now you have to mask surrounding geometry each time.
• Polygon grouping and smoothing of the polygon group edges.
• A solid auto-retopology tool (like ZBrush ZRemesher or 3D-Coat Autopo).
• Easy cutting using a custom curve or shape.
• A tool to easily Boolean all intersecting parts of the same mesh (like the Remesh by Boolean deformer in ZBrush).

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So, maybe let’s list things we would like to have, and then vote. Also may be usefull to split this to a new thread.

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Right, I think a thread on the devtalk forum could have more chances to get the conversation going directly with the devs, what do you think?

Edit: Spent some time browsing the devtalk forum, looking for any sculpt related threads. Seems like the use of rightclickselect is encouraged by the devs because is an easy way to see how popular a request is before even trying to make any effort on the development side.

:+1: I’ve posted my Sculpt Mode wishlist at Right-Click Select. If you like the list, please upvote it, and If you leave a comment with your wish(es), I’ll add it to the list and credit you.

Many thanks!

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Great! I’ll add my comments there :+1:

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:+1: I’ve added your wishes, @julperado.

Other wishes and/or votes from anyone are welcome in the growing Sculpt Mode wishlist at Right-Click Select. Thanks!

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About crowdfunding for Blender sculpting tools, the problem we are having is that Sculpt and paint mode in Blender is orphan. We need to get first a developer who will be maintaining that part of Blender then we can talk about crowdfunding. Because even right there many GSOC and patches that are almost ready with good feature but they are just hanging since no one is ready to continue that work.
Right now the Devs that we have are busy and focusing on their favorite part of Blender and only in part time they work on sculpting and painting.
Lately we have been seeing some patches on sculpt brush and so on, but by the lack committed maintainer, patches are not reviewed quickly and the worse case they will be forgotten and collect dust.
RightClickSelect is more or less a good place but since the sculpt and paint mode doesn’t have a maintainer we will end up in the same kind problem as i mentioned above.
We really need a maintainer, think about eevee, GP (as 2D animation tool)few years ago we didn’t have them and Devs committed themself and now we have so so many renders almost Cycles quality, and they are keeping improving them. How long we have been having dyntopo performance issues? We still don’t have an auto-retopo option (even good addons BF doesn’t support them).

Best we can do as artists is to spread the word with our tool and skill hopefully we will motivate new developer or reactivate some dormant maintainers to come to revive paint and sculpting.

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You’re right, but I don’t think that’ll work either, just wait until someone decides to work on it is basically what we do right now.

That’s why I mentioned a collective effort; that goes from bringing the sculpt shortcommings to the attention of the BF but also trying to find someone who would be interested not only in adding features but in doing all the real, dirty work of maintenance and keeping everything updated.

I’m not talking about just asking for features, I’m talking about get together to manage all the things needed to bring this to a reality, from looking for a developer, to getting the greenlight from Ton, to create and promote a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the developer’s work. Just like Daniel Martinez Lara did for the grease pencil tools.

Starting to do some noise on rightclickselect or the devtalk forum is just a small part of the work that would need to be done, and it can’t stop there.

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julper, you’ve summed it up well here.
i agree 100% on all the points. what needs to be done, by who, and chronologically as well. also on the type of roadblocks one would be facing.

i don’t have the time currently to lead an endeavor like this, but would definitely contribute. maybe when my schedule clears up i could write up something, and we get a core group of hard core blender sculptors to pilot this.

such a shame about rightclickselect, i don’t think i ever went to that page, maybe once when it was first made. i find it repulsive and unethical to name a site that is geared for blender feature requests to be called rightclickselect! it’s insulting. rightclickselect sums just about everything that is wrong with blender.
why would i even visit that site, what would i hope to achieve considering the name?! my first gripe and feature request always was and will be fix the fucking rightclickselect. BTW you know, it’s interesting that Ton is left handed … just saying, he uses his index finger to rightclickselect :wink:

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Hehehe yes, rightclickselect is like the passive/agressive way of some people to say “F*@k everyone who wants to have normal behavior on an already complicated piece of software!!”.
I honestly don’t care, the site has proved to be a good way to see what the community wants, and as long as the possibility to change defaults still exists, I’m ok with it; also William Reynish has said several times that he’s working on implementing an alternative keymap with propper support for LMB select and RMB for contextual menus, so there’s a bit more hope for 2.8.

Anyway, back on the topic of sculpting, on the latest Blendertoday video, Pablo Vasquez mentioned a new dedicated community for the VSE https://blender.community/c/vse/, and said maybe a sculpting community should be created too. I don’t know if someone is working on it already but sounds cool, a place dedicated just to the proposals and requests for sculpt tools and workflow can’t be bad.

In the meantime we should work on a shared document (google docs?) where we can put all the things that we would like to see fixed, improved, or added to the sculpting tools in Blender, as well as any proposals or ideas to fund this whole thing. I can do a first version on the weekend and share it here so you guys can contribute too. :slight_smile:

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Nice sculpts mister! Looks like we have another rock´n rolla on our hands :sunglasses:
Some of the same issues Elvis had early, I notice with your portraits aswell. Check out his thread HERE, if you haven´t already! There are some tipps and tricks on sculpting faces, that you might find useful. And keep rolling! Welcome to the forum! :wink:

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@anon61551747

Thank you for the warm welcome! I really have a lot of catching up to do. So many excellent sketchbooks to scrutinize as well! Checking out your link ASAP :+1:

edit: wow so many useful pointers you dropped in that thread! I can’t wait to put them to practice on my next sculpt. Like you say, rock n roll :+1: