Sculpting - I Dont get it

Support Modeling
#1

Okay. I tryed to search the forum, but there was just too many … eh… sculpt words laying around so i couldnt find anything useful. Nor the manual gives me much of idea or explanation (if it is even needed).

edit: Before you read this. I ment this topic to be about Sculpting. Not about my model. So dont bother too much commenting it. Thanks :smiley:

Anyway i started to experiment with Sculpting and i decided to do something intresting. So i ended up fooling around to do H.R Gigers Alien. But after a while i just was baffled about the sculpt mode… Perhaps next image explains.

http://www.dv-studios.org/blender/alien.jpg

I mean… it has like trillion polygons. Trillino polygons i have relatively little control over and propably half of trillion non-needed polygons. I am getting all jagged edges… pointy stray polygons and smoothing wipes out every detail i am making (no matter the hardness setting, I mean less hardnes less effect on the “bad” polygons too).

I am not really blaming the program cause i’ve seen some pretty amazing works done with this. But i just dont see how they did it :S… But i find that i should learn sculpting just because i expect that i need to create “sculptish” stuff a lot in future.

#2

you know i have just started playing with that too and i have found it not so easy. but i have not looked in to it to much yet. figured it was me. i would like a video on this.
i have a wacom pen that i dont use much i blender. figured it woud be good for this.

#3

First, turn off Draw Normals so as to better visualize the mesh in Edit mode.

Second, Sculpt mode by nature will require dense geometry to produce many small details. Most of the time, Multires and Normal mapping is used to transfer the details of the dense version of a mesh to it’s lower-poly version . . . which are easier to texture and animate.

Sometimes the Sculpting tools are used to ‘rough out’ an organic shape, which is then overlayed with a properly deforming and less-dense mesh using the Retopo feature.

Don’t worry . . . improvements to the Sculpting tools are sure to come, which will make it easier to use and more practical in production use. In the meantime, push it and your system as far as they will go so as to improve your skill in using the existing functionality.

BTW: Nice model!

#4

can you tell us more about your workflow - when you say smoothing, are you referring to sculpt smooth brush? or “set smooth” or subsurf? I’ve done some sculpting on a head model with around 1.4M polys. There was plenty of detail to use an elephant skin texture to add wrinkles. Once I figured out (though I forget now) the shortcuts for the different modes and resizing/rotating the brush on the fly, things went much quicker.

#5

Sculpt is good for pulling really rough shapes into coherent shapes that can be retopologized, it’s also good for taking stuff modeled with good topology and adding extreme detail to them. It is not good for turning a cube into a wrinkle-perfect model, simply because that approach is undirected, and thus extremely inefficient and doesn’t allow for concentrating and managing detail where it’s needed.

I know this is a really lame self-reference, but like in this (unfinished) model I made.

http://zombiedog.spindash.net/image/norm_head.png

The majority of the solid features were roughed out first in a way that let the sub-division of sculpt mode take advantage of them. Extra loops around the eyes, nose and mouth, following the flow of the muscles, less on the horns and other bits of the body, etc.

At this stage you should go to a slightly lower level of multi-res, and go over it with the topology tool, highlight all the most obvious shapes, and then go over them again to get the detail in properly. It’s a nice model, and it’d be a shame to let it stop here.

#6

very true about modeling efficiency Blackboe - mine started as a cube. bad. but it was my first try ever, and I was impressed with what my ahtlon xp2400 with 1gb ram (linux) and geforce 5900 256 card could throw around.

#7

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=996506

Well this is how my first attempt on sculpting ended.