Hey all.
I had an idea this morning, “3D sculpting. Blender has it, but is like the real world?” My main thought was how a potter uses a spinning platform / lathe to turn the clay as they sculpt. They have the feel of radial symmetry, but with more variance and control.
I animated a small cylindrical model and subsurf’ed it to a sufficient sculpting level, then animated it to turn quickly on the z axis. Surprisingly, a model can be edited while an animation is playing! Try it for yourself.
I think I’m the first to try this in Blender, although one Autodesk user suggested it as a real feature a while back.
Its not very stable but tell me what you think of it.
I had actually tried this a few years back. I was frustrated with the lack of fidelity in the radial symmetry settings and decided to compensate with motion. it does work surprisingly well to sculpt while animating.
It would be really interesting to see some form of clay physics integrated into this technique, so that you can make a thin walled pot without pushing one side through the other.
Now I’m just dreaming, but it would be cool to integrate that system with the 3d printing tools to generate spirally printed pottery. might be better to develop those tools as a more standalone system, rather than trying to integrate a somewhat specific toolset into the general codebase.
Hahaha ! That’s amazing. Like in the real world. In fact, there seems to be only one shortcoming : the mesh is updated only when the cursor moves. It’s not too bad. Thanks for sharing Lightman !