how do i paint a sculpture i imported into blender from sculptris? a human head. i can get the whole sculpture to go 1 color but how do i add multipal materials to different parts of the face. will i have to use layers? i tried to take it into photo shop to paint but cant get it to open, says its the wrong kind of file, i dont have cs5 extended with 3-d program. is there a way i can still paint my sculpt in cs5 standard, then do the hair & texturing in blender. i would like to be able to use brushes and blend colors. is circle & box select & selecting vertices my only option? is there a way to select uneven swatches of skin to color & shade without ending up with a paint by numbers effect? sorry for all the questions. and thank you all for your patience & help…bs.
I’m not much experienced with the Texture Paint mode in Blender, but in case this can help you :
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Export your Sculptris piece in OBJ format
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In Blender , delete every object you have (the ones you don’t want to keep as importing an obj will not delete what is already there) File -> Import -> Wavefront (.obj) and import your sculpt.
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Now unless you have a good computer and a graphic card that is very opengl friendly, viewport performance in edit mode willl be horrible with a high poly sculpt, the best method would be to retopo ( good video tutorial about it there ) to get a much lower poly model.
And it’s really recommended to retopo, because Blender Texture Paint mode with high poly model has horrible performance (unlike Sculptris Paint Mode that has much much better performance) -
But if you just want to paint on your sculpt without going the retopo path, while being in Object Mode set Blender display to Wireframe mode, Wireframe mode will give you much better viewport performance.
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Select your model and go to Edit Mode. There with the whole model selected, press U then Project from View. This step is usually unecessary but it’s a trick to save performance when you’ll go into the UV/Image Editor, as by default Blender is extremely sluggish in the UV/Image Editor if the high poyl model is not unwrapped.
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Split your screen in 2 and change one of the 3D View into the UV/Image Editor.
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In the UV/Image Editor click on Image -> New Image and select the color you want by default, 1024x1024 should be the minimum size of the texture you want if you hope to have some nice details, 2048x2048 would be better but depending on how your computer is Blender friendly, it may be very taxing on ressource (and already with a high poly sculpt it will be hitting your computer hard).
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Then in the 3D View press U then Smart Unwrap Project (the same kind of Sculptris Blender would do) and at “Island Margin” change the 0.00 to 0.05 to give a bit of space between the UV island (and avoid painting overlapping on them).
wait until it’s finished (you’ll see in the UV/Image Editor) it can take a few minutes depending on how high poly your sculpt can be.
Once done, go into Texture Paint mode and change the display from wireframe to solid.
Performance should be bad unfortunately, unless you have a powerfull computer and a graphic card that is very opengl friendly.
That’s why if you really want to use Blender to paint, i strongly suggest to learn retopo first, while it’s not hard it takes time. But in term of performance you’ll have much better texture paint session in Blender with a retopologised model.
Thankyou Sanctuary, i am going to start to study retopo, thanks for the tutes as well. i also would like to try to gain a better understanding of the sculptris painting program. as it stands now the sculpt i exported to blender has a little under 50,000 triangles, i suppose i could have used the reduce brush more, but i was concerned about loosing detail. thanks so much for your help, i will press on. …bs.