I recently decided to try out sculptint. This will serve as a record of my journey, let’s all hope it won’t end soon. Any tips and tricks are welcomed.
Currently I’m using Wacom Bamboo tablet, looking for to change it for something new in the near future.
2020-08-11 Flesh monster
2020-08-10 Hand
2020-08-07 Mouse that turned out like a rat - this is where my journey started!
Not really happy with the sculpt from today, don’t why it came out blurred and there are some artifacts on the forehead and around the nose. I run into a couple problems and couldn’t really get the jaw. I’m pretty happy with how the eyes and the tongue came out though.
I was going to learn something new (curve hair) but as it turns out I derailed everything with sculpting a frog.
You have really fantastic lighting in all your images. Are you using Cycles?
Thanls! Yeah, I’m using cycles for everything - most of my lighting setups consist of two large point lights and 1-3 smaller ones to make some sharp lighting on the model.
Well, lighting is one if those often neglected arts in 3D. A lot of people just slap a .hdr In the environment and call it finished, but you’ve lit these with purpose.
A phrase I love is ‘sculpting is the art of manipulating light and shadow’, and you’ve demonstrated it here nicely.
Any reason you use point lights and not area lights?
I’ve been using mesh with emissions for the longest time, then I switched to area lights and now I’m using mainly point lights due to their versatility. I like it that if I set them up to be pretty big they give really nice soft shadows and when they are smaller they can give nice and crisp reflections. Don’t get me wrong - I’m still using area lamps from time to time and I’m always on the lookout for some intermediate course on lighting. Sadly, I didn’t find anything worth mentioning and my approach is an amalgam of experience coupled with various stuff I picked up from tutorials.
This is how Area lights behave. The inverse square law. I’m coming from a Max/Maya Arnold/Vray background so it’s weird to hear of people using point lights. Point lights have been legacy/obsolete in Max/Maya for 10 years or so, with the advent of physically based lighting and Area lights 
I can recommend this. It’s pretty old, but the techniques/theories are timeless.
Long time ago I watch one video about lighting on Vimeo, can find this now. Dude use C4D for presentation, anyway this can be replicated in any software. Most interesting part is that he do not use global illumination. He gradually build his light, one by one.
Also I watch one ( C4D again 
) dude which intentionally do not use GI just because practice. I try it… in some scenes I had 60 or more lights, ( point lights, spot lights, are… ), with different fallof. Great exercise, force you to really think 
PS. nice addon for Blender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGm6d9LX4SY … bring to Blender functionality which I know from other software.
Thankfully, since physically based lighting/LWF has become the norm, we don’t have to fake lighting anymore. 
I started rendering in Max scanline way before ray-tracing/GI/LWF/IBL and while it might sound wistfully artistic that you’re ‘painting with light’, the reality is that it was a pain. Remember the ‘100-spotlight array dome’ to fake GI?
Anyway, I always start my lighting setup with IBL turned off and just set up the lights one by one(basic 2 or 3 point lighting), but I will always add some sort of IBL(even on a low setting) because there is always ambient lighting in the real world.
Ha, ha… I still have ‘100-spotlight array dome’ for C4D, with gradient. Hardware is not limitation factor these days like in past. But, this is good practice, to learn how light “work”. You always can get some “base mesh” and make “artistic” tweaking, but it’s good to know sphere to character workflow, right?
Well, not really any more. I learned it back then because it wasn’t an option. There was no GI, no raytracing, no light bounce, no colour bleed, no exposure… you had to fake all those effects by placing lights, but it was all arbitrary, light falloff and shadows didn’t follow physical laws and light intensity meant nothing. Plus we weren’t working in gamma corrected linear workflow so nothing ‘really’ looked correct. Thankfully that’s all legacy now and behind us.
You can of course still practice lighting with modern physically based approaches, and even moreso because it’s all based on real world light physics and photography. So, learning how ‘light works’ is going to be a lot more beneficial if you’re learning how it actually works and not how you think it should work. 
16/08/2020 - Sculpt #008 - base mesh - first full figure.
19/08/2020 - Sculpt #009 - David sculpture. This was pretty difficult and I wanted to stop more than once but I’m glad I finished it. See more: David
21/08/2020 - Sculpt #010 - that’s what I’m working on now - penitent one from game Blasphemous
