Sanc's sketchbook

Thanks,
Yes, the skin modifier, being very early alpha produce unfortunately some holes and disconnected faces, so it’s better to keep the base shape low poly with it, as it’s easier to repair it manually before subdividing.

On my computer most of your links don’t display, but from those that do it looks very intersting… It’s a shame that none of your later ones do so I can’t comment on anything recent.

Noticing on your location, it reminded me that on another forum there were members from Australia and Phillipines that couldn’t see pictures hosted on imageshack.

I wonder if it is a common problem between imageshack and some countries.

I uploaded all the pictures to imgur , under every of the picture you can’t see there should now be a direct link to the same picture but this time hosted on imgur.

If it works for you, i’ll start using imgur then for my future picture hosting.

Yeh I can see your imgur images. My suggestion is why adding some shading to the eye, maybe a slight blend or something? At the moment they give a flat look rather than a bright one.

By shading to the eyes, do you mean something like this :
http://i.imgur.com/kMAi3s.jpg

nice mosnter mister

Thank you.

It is rather strange where inspiration can lead you sometime.

After sculpting some cartoony characters like the Ogre or the pseudo-dinosaur from the previous page, i wanted to give another go at something more human-like, though without using references as it was just some relaxing sculpting i didn’t planned to get something really serious.

So in Sculptris i ended from the default sphere into this :

I don’t often use Sculptris paint mode despite it is brillant (though my old system does not allow me to use the bump map painting), but for some reason i decided to paint with some reptilian scale brush added with a bit of green and yellow :

After that i wondered how it would look with some simple normal map in Blender.
I took the texture map created by Sculptris, and in GIMP transformed it into a normal map with the nice plugin mentionned in previous page.
After that, i just made a simple render :

Hmm, there was then a little something, i’m not sure what it was, that then compelled me to model a hat and a monocle in Blender to give that sculpture a “character”.
I activated the ambient occlusion as the shadow was a bit too heavy and didn’t made the render very nice, leading into a fun result :

A bit of my works with the Blender/Sculptris combination.
Toying around with cubes and some loop cuts
http://i.imgur.com/w5Dvds.jpg

then with a bit more of loop cutting and tweaking
http://i.imgur.com/FuL9us.jpg

making a pose, to reminds me of how to use armatures , as it’s been a long time i spent modelling exclusively
http://i.imgur.com/P6HDLs.jpg

after a bit more topology tweaking, it was time to export that base model into Sculptris for some sculpt job
http://i.imgur.com/w9T13s.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/JCjGKs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/koyOBs.jpg

Did this one from the default sphere to see if Sculptris Alpha 6 was working better or similar to 1.02/Alpha 5
http://i.imgur.com/1FTWes.jpg

And entirely from the default Sculptris sphere :
http://i.imgur.com/KEqWXs.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wOWlFs.jpg

And a little fun side project using some Dwarf Fortress inspiration with created in Blender a Dwarven Space Shuttle built with barrels
http://i.imgur.com/FjxVKs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SZeqss.jpgs

Sometime with just letting your imagination going in Blender with simple shapes and primitives, then playing with the tools and functions, you can obtain some nice results

attached to this post is a test base model for a head to see multires performances

Attachments

testmulti.blend (122 KB)

Exporting the woman head i built in Blender from the previous post and toying with it in Sculptris

http://i.imgur.com/A8NL8s.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Trse9s.jpg http://i.imgur.com/G8mLks.jpg

Then having some fun in Sculptris, sculpting a head from the sphere, letting random inspiration guide it.
http://i.imgur.com/5vdoDs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/PRDJvs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/OAIoEs.jpg

And finally another work roughly inspired by some vampire character run in dungeon crawl, Sculptris is really a fantastic application, it feels so natural, there’s simply nothing else that has even half its intuitivity and feeling of clay tweak freedom .
http://i.imgur.com/v3Kums.jpg http://i.imgur.com/TVmyfs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ljcE8s.jpg

Love seeing that others are using Sculptris with Blender also. I just discovered Sculptris several days ago, and I’ve been tinkering around with it. Seems to be fun to use too - but considering I’ve just begun, I still have some things to learn in it. I’ve just started with a basic humanoid form, which I found out isn’t too hard to do in Sculptris. But so far, I haven’t decided what characters I’m going to make with the form - right now, I’m just messing around making a ‘generic’ humanoid form, which I plan to use in making more detailed characters in the future. I’m into comics myself - and that might be a good place to start. I’m also an avid video game player, especially of Nintendo’s games. I’m thinking of making some of the characters from the Legend of Zelda series, which I really love. I’ve already downloaded models for the games from Zelda Capital, but I think making characters from the games myself would be an excellent way to start modelling in Sculptris. Plus, I’ve already made the different colored rupees from the game in Blender - good start, in my opinion.

Sculptris is really impressive in its design, i don’t think i ever used a program that gives the artist a feeling of “freedom” like a sculptor has with real clay in front of him, you don’t think anymore in term of faces, edges, topology etc… you can just let your inspiration work (and can retopo in Blender at anytime).

The extremely well designed interface is so intuitive that never you feel there’s an interface between you and your piece of work.

the Sculptris/Blender combo has never let me down.

Some recent orc-ish creature head i built in Sculptris, this one starting from the default sphere instead of a self made Blender base
http://i.imgur.com/ujfmQs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/XB7VBs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hxms5s.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/y5dPRs.jpg

Awesum… I admire your workflow and… how effient is that gimp-plugin?!! Also congrats for being able to -sucessfully- importing something in to sculptris. That never werked for me :wink:

Thanks
The gimp normal map plugin is really good (and has lots of settings to control yourgenerated normal map)

The Sculptris importer is very limited in what you can import.

Due to its limitations it’s very important to never get something like this before importing into Sculptris :
http://i.imgur.com/EaxWv.jpg

Sculptris is unable sadly to import something that feature lots of edges sharing the same vertice, a few is ok, but more and it will crash during loading. You must change it before import, like this by example :
http://i.imgur.com/bffs0.jpg

There’s too the non manifold problem that can have Sculptris crashing on import sometime ( here’s a tutorial on how to fix them )

Additionally, despite it should be able to do that (i even managed sometime to get such object imported) , object with an UV sometime will crash if you load them and go to Paint Mode, while loading it into the Sculpt mode does not have this problem.
Unfortunate that Sculptris is unable to just open them in Sculpt Mode while keeping the UV map.

Those are long standing problems knowns and reported since several versions that i hoped to see fixed in the recent Alpha 6, unfortunately they’re always there.

Trust me Rob, I agree. There isn’t as much to learn with the interface in Sculptris as there is with the interface in Blender, which makes it easier to sculpt with. But it’s great to learn Blender also, if you also want to make models that aren’t ‘organic’ looking, such as machinery. Both are great 3D modeling tools, and I’m beginning to find out it’s often better to have more than one tool to use when modelling. :slight_smile:

A bit of fun with Sculptris, a completely random sketching session starting from the default sphere.
http://i.imgur.com/73Scws.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wEOzJs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ykB2cs.jpg

Even after all this time, i always have a great time sketching and sculpting within Sculptris.
Too bad it will probably never get updated after the zbrush implementation of its sculpting method.

Hopefully one day we’ll see something like this stable in Blender with good performance.

In the early days of Sculptris i had attempted a Superman head, with its specific hair curl
http://i.imgur.com/Coa15s.jpg

I was very unexperienced with Sculptris (youtube has been a great source of learning in term of Sculptris usage, lots of tricks that helped to shape my sculpt better are coming from observing those talented people making their timelapses) and Sculptris was crawling at only 80.000 poly (it was a bug in the 1st few versions that was fortunately fixed that allowed much more)

So i started with a basic shape made in Blender to get a sense of proportions :
http://i.imgur.com/9PYK6s.jpg

Then after lot of work i ended with this
http://i.imgur.com/3aQpBs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5ZPbZs.jpg

So as i had a random head ready, i was wondering if i could modify it in a way that could be reminding of Superman. I used a few photos of Christopher Reeve from google image search to get an idea of what kind of proportions and face feature i was going to do, the goal would have been to have a piece ressembling him a bit.
A big challenge as i never tried to sculpt anything ressembling any reference so far.
http://i.imgur.com/Cg2YFs.jpg

It was a bit better than i thought, but not really Reeve-like , though at least it was reminding a bit of a Superman head shape.

I’m not good with sculpting hair, in fact i didn’t managed it very well, so i will not show the piece from another angle to hide some bad things ;D
But i must say that the mask function was rather awesomely usefull there, i hope Blender will have one someday, there was a GSOC this year that had a mask function, it worked nice though far from as intuitively as in Sculptris.

Anyways, i reworked a bit the head shape too, and the body type to make it a bit more bulky.
http://i.imgur.com/nzdwKs.jpg

Well, not really the Christopher Reeve homage i was hoping to build, but in the end i think it’s an improvement over my old version of Superman of the early Sculptris days.

Here’s a view with some other Sculptris materials :

http://i.imgur.com/t621Hs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/KfHdHs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/TJPp5s.jpg

The 1st one reminds a bit more of Reeve, interesting to see how much different of a feeling a material can bring to the same piece.

I’ve followed this amazing thread. Simply your works rock!

Although is far better using references cuz in the past I didn’t use some, but then when used them for the purpose of sense the surfaces my learning improved a lot!:evilgrin:

Thank you.

You are right about using references, as i noticed that without giving a look to any and sculpting just on “feel” i often had proportions going very wrong after a while without me noticing at first, and once the piece was completed, it was becoming obviously out of proportions in my eyes.

Some experimentations with Blender.
I found in google image a picture of the famous “astronaut” of a bas-relief in Palenque, the one that looks like there’s a mayan riding some kind of cosmic vehicle.
http://i.imgur.com/brErm.jpg

It made me wanting to give a try to displacement maps. The main problem of displacement maps is that they need a very lot of faces to do anything remotely nice.
So here was my attempt with the texture displacing a (heavily subdivided) plane :
http://i.imgur.com/b0hpns.jpg

And the textures colors added on top :
http://i.imgur.com/Niwhas.jpg

attached to this post a base head simple model, mostly for testing Dyntopo sculpting with it.
attached too is the modo.xml theme for Blender (in the zip)

Attachments

headbasetest.blend (82.8 KB)modotheme.zip (3.82 KB)