I watched a video of Mudbox sculpting. A guy was using Scrape brush on 160k mesh to shape up a rock by giving the mesh flat areas as if you would do using knife on a piece of clay. And then he added texture (stamp) to the brush to add details to the surface as he scraped off “chunks”.
That technique would work well for hard surface sculpting too (without stamp texture).
Is there anything like that in Blender? Thanks.
Hi I think you might be in the wrong forum section.
In any case, I’m not exactly familiar with mudbox but from the description I also think that you might be after the flatten/contrast brush with it’s sculpt plane set to ‘area plane’ and most importantly - locked. Also you might find to complete the effect that you’re after you need to change the plane offset to a negative value.
You can try adding different textures in the texture slot of that brush or others to see if that replicates the ‘stamp’ that you’re referring to.
Hope that helps.
Is there a link to that video by the way? Perhaps that might help if I’m way off the mark.
Click on the brush image and there you have the scrape brush.
But remember, sculpt in blender has not the intention of be like zbrush or mudbox. Is just a working tool and it makes a correct job. Think of another 3D app if they have such tool too (max, maya,…). Blender has it is almost always the answer!
I tried that and I am not sure what it is, but it doesn’t really work for me (maybe scale of the model is too big? I noticed Sculpt doesn’t really work well with meshes of big scale).
Sorry, forgot to post the link: http://youtu.be/uCtjt1qudfQ?hd=1&t=10m2s
I saw that video the other day. I tried to duplicate it - I can’t get it quite as good as his is, but it’s okay. Probably just a matter of fiddling with the settings.
Here is a Blend file if you want to try it. Hopefully the textures embed, I’ve never done that.
Cool stuff, it works great! Thanks xrg!
Is there any breakdown on brushes of Blender’s Sculpt? For example what’s the difference between Polish and Flatten brushes? Or practical application for each brush (there isn’t any Blender video, unlike Mudbox/ZBrush videos, where an artist explains why he used certain brushes in certain situations).
I just figured them out by messing with them myself. I find even just chiseling a cube to be fun. :evilgrin:
Most of the brushes are relatively similar to Zbrush and Mudbox but have different names. Clay tubes in Zbrush is Clay Strips in Blender. The Damien Standard brush in Zbrush is Crease in Blender.
Polish is the same as Flatten except it has autosmooth enabled. If you have a tablet, the amount of smoothing is pressure controlled too. It’s basically just a softer edged version of flatten though. It’s a pretty good brush for hard surface things such as armor plates.
If youre talking about that long hour rocksculpting video thats going round, the technique mainly revolves around a brush that flattens along the surface normal.
I have yet to figure that out but I have been figuring out a way to port the rest of the technique to blender.
workflows like this.
create something rock looking by moving about subdivided cube.
keep one rock seperate (to run boolean on later)
then duplicate, rotate and join a few others,
then grab your last rock, place it and add boolean unify apply
this creates a solid mesh with no interior faces.
but it creates triangles, so then use remesh modifier to go back to quads apply
Then go into sculpt mode - multires modifier and enhance the flat faces most likely with flatten or polish.
If that wasnt what youre talking about and I just sound mental then ignore me.
For the sculpting with texture subject, on pixologic website there are a very lot of alpha textures that can be used with Blender sculpt mode :
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/alpha/
Pixologic even offer a big pack with them all.
But they’re in PSD format, while on linux/mac it’s not problem, since Blender 2.57 , PSD (and GIF) support have been removed from Blender for Windows OS , so you’ll have to convert the ones you want into another format (jpg/png/tga/etc…)
In case you never used a texture in Blender sculpt mode, it’s powerfull , certainly not zbrush/mudbox level, but still very good to use .
Here’s a quick how to :
Once in Sculpt mode, select the brush you want to use with a texture, then click on the Texture panel (by default to the right of the screen) and click on the “Brush Texture” button :
Then click on “New” then “Open” to load your texture
By example a snake skin-like one :
You’ll notice the texture appear too in the “Texture” browser in the sculpt menu to the left (you can this way load several texture, and switch between them here) , then you change your brush setting the way you want , and choose the “fixed” , “tiled” and “3d” texture option (try and see what they do)
(just remember that Blender sculpt mode does not use some dynamic tesselation like Sculptris, it means that to get any kind of nice detail, you’ll need a high vertices density, so high facecount/higher multires level)
Thread moved to the correct support forum.
The issue I am having currently (Ubuntu 12.04 64bit) is no pressure sensitivity on my Wacom.
@Sanctuary: Yeah, I knew how to use textures for stamps. The issue is that in Mudbox/ZBrush even if the polycount is lower than in Blender, textures create nice and well defined relief. I guess it’s just a matter of even mesh density. I wonder if there is a way to redistribute mesh wire to create even topology??
@mrjynx: The whole idea is to sculpt one or two pieces and then combine them in any fashion you want. If there was a way to preserve UV maps on boolean operation and cleanup, I’d simply join final models with UV maps with boolean operation, then clean it up. With UVs preserved there would be no issues keeping pre-baked textures.
Or, put together highpoly models and manually retopo it (but that would be such a pain). Or join together highpoly models, and remesh it in the Meshlab with Preserve Boundaries checkbox on.
@xrg: I don’t really have extensive experience in sculpting and I have never used anything else besides Blender (sculpting-wise). So it makes the research on brushes harder.
@Bao2: No offense, but Blender wiki is a basic documentation. It’s doesn’t tell me much beyond simple technical specs.
The remesh modifier should be able to do that, it tries to create evenly distributed (edit : no i meant un-evenly , not evenly) quads of similar sizes.
But don’t expect a good topology like one done manually though.