The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 1)

If you want a really good, very thorough sculpting video tutorial, buy this one by @Zacharias_Reinhardt:

It’s made with Blender 2.79, but it contains a lot of useful tips that are still valid.

I was playing with VDB remesh, I still prefer dyntopo, I don’t lose details and it doesn’t smooth the mesh.
Could be nice to ad a quad remesh on top of the vdb remesh to make like dynamesh.

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Exactly. These Blender vids are FN simply promoting their coming paid tutorials. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but that video explained absolutely nothing of the Blender sculpting workflow and was essentially a general ‘philosophy of sculpting’ discussion.

As a hard-core Zbrush user and 2.80 beginner I was hoping for their take on a comparison between the sculpting experiences of Blender from the perspective of fellow long-time ZB users. Disappointing.

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This is not the case at all. They are very much used for different workflows. As with everything in ZB, there a many, many ways and workflows to get to the same place. The most beautiful thing about ZB is that all the tools are so brilliantly designed that everything works so well together. This is why we see endless workflow innovations from users year after year.

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To be honest I can’t watch an entire Flipped Normals video without almost falling asleep. These guys ramble on and on and on, mostly about generalities. The really useful tips are usually hidden somewhere between all the babble. :slightly_smiling_face:

It’s a podcast format. They’re conversational on purpose. Most of their content is subjective/ anecdotal accounts of working inside and outside of the industry.

FN’s appeal is their personableness, people gravitate towards the banter. That’s the backbone of most internet content these days.

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While I agree with what you’ve said, in this case it would have been more suitable to actually say a few words on the technology/experience of Blender sculpting specifically, rather than the principles of sculpting in general. They have already produced an exhaustive amount of videos on the very same thing already.

A lot of people watching this are seasoned Zbrush sculptors who might be keeping an eye on 2.80 sculpting features in relation to ZB and the feasibility of maybe trying it out. We don’t need a ‘sculpting 101’ when an overview of the workflow would have been far more useful.

As for the banter, I much prefer when it’s just the bald lad with the glasses(Henning I think) on his own.

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I saw Pixar’s Regularized Kelvinlets brushes long time ago and hoped that we might see them one day.
https://vimeo.com/216753419

now they are almost ready for 2.81a.
https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1167442584224108545

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The new brush cursor got committed to master. :partying_face:

https://developer.blender.org/rBe0c792135adf8de3e6a54ddcbab53cab95b2b019

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next hope is this :pray:
Dynamic Kelvinlets: Secondary Motions based on Fundamental Solutions of Elastodynamics

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About damn time.
That patch was collecting dust already. :rofl:

Ever since I saw Pixar’s demo video I wanted it in Blender. This is going to be so good for quickly creating cartoon character’s expressions.

Aren’t these brushes used for doing animation sculpting at Pixar as well? This technology should play pretty well with the Animation 2020 project. :smile:

I sure hope so. From what I’d heard Aligorith say, the issue is coming up with a good control system for the sculpted shapes. Obviously, using shape keys is possible, but this means creating all the shapes in advance. What would be better (and maybe this will come with static overrides, I have no idea) is to be able to sculpt expressions on the fly, thus eliminating the need for overly complicated facial rigs.

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Complex facial rigs are still going to be needed for a lot of cases, as not every animator can sculpt, and even then - that’s a very, very long process. Animating a series with this technique would not be possible due to time constraints (usually around ten seconds a day).

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Why should that be a problem? You can create new shape keys whenever you need them, which actually is much more efficient than doing all in advance and then using only half of them.

But if your character is linked in from an external file then there’s currently no way to create the shapes in the scene where you’re animating. Unless that was implemented and I hadn’t heard about it. So that would mean that every time you needed to sculpt an expression you’d have to go back to your source file, create a shape key, add a custom property in the rig to drive it, come back to your animation, then keyframe the intensity of the shape.

What I think is needed is a way to animate directly on the mesh with no shape keys. Perhaps the animation data could be stored in some sort of vertex animation modifier that we can turn off if necessary.

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So what you are saying is that Blenders shape key system needs an update?
Because the workflow you described sounds really painful and there should be better ways to do it, since using external linked rigs is the norm in production.
I admit, i am not really familiar with Blenders rigging and animation system.

these “brushes” are meant for sculpting poses and final polish after the animation is done and you bake the rig u could also use them for final sculpted model, Pixar already have an advanced system where Animators don’t need to see complex rigs and manipulate them without custom controls(hidden) something like blender’s FaceMaps…however i wonder if ti’s possible to make these brushes work for 2d(Grease Pencil) too, that would be nice.

I think the current shape key system is okay for what it’s traditionally used for which is storing premade expressions, correcting armature deforms, and other things like that. For creating new expressions on the fly it’s hopelessly outdated. Remember, the current shape key system was created for Elephants Dream and has barely seen an update since.

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