The person who created the sculpting part in blender is he an artist?

I just want know why sculpting tools were designed that way. similar to other programs.
prompts the following questions:::
–so what happens when a technical person designs art tools.
does it become too technical?
++why are there more 2D artists than 3D artists?

The seed of blenders sculpting functions can be traced back to the very early days. About the same time that blender.org split off from Elysium. I couldn’t tell you what exactly inspired it, but it wasn’t my impression that it was attempting to be a zbrush clone, if that’s what you were wondering.

Probably because 2D is more of an ‘any stroke you make can pothentially be part of your finished work’-thing.
3D on the other hand usually involves more time to final pixel (unless you go full on playing with readymade LEGO bricks mode).

Kind of like writing a novel vs. making a life-action movie.

greetings, Kologe

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It was not created by one person.
There was a turn over of developers who took in charge this module.
Each one added tools that he thought he could add, wanted to add and dialogue with community to know if it was OK or not, if he could go further.

17 years ago, in 2.41, a python script bundled to release was allowing to sculpt with only 3 brushes.
The first release containing a sculpt mode was 2.43, one year later.

The mode grew up during 2 decades, according to evolution of computers, software abilities and developers availability.

There are more 2D artists ; because a 2D sketch is a preliminary step to almost any artistic work since millions of years.
It is still faster than a 3D sketch, that implies to care about a supplementary dimension.
But 3D has never been as easy as now.

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I also think:
First there has to be a technical idea how something (like for example sculpting) can be adressed in a effective way… so at first it’s a technical question…
Just have a look at 2D drawing on computers… after having devices to input 2D data (and pressure and maybe even inclination angles…) you “just have to store it” but this also gives you the problem that pixels are squares… and you have to have some proper resoultion… and…

Only later there were things implemeneted like for example a water color brush like behaviour or something acting like oil paint brush… (and i don’t meant filters).

For 3D this is a much more complex problem / task to solve…

There will be always somethign missing compared to the real thing (like the haptic when your both hands are feeling the clay while sculpting something)… and on the other hand there are things possible which are impossible while doing this the classic way ( ← or at least would take verryyy lllooonnnnggg ).

On possibility is merging this… first doing something real… then scanning/photgrammetizing (?) it and go forth…

The sculpting tools are the result of code written by multiple people. I would assume most people who write code professionally are not also artists professionally, but I would also assume Pablo Dobarro is not the only guy who worked on the tools who also used them for art.

Regardless, part of the reason the Blender Studio exists is so the Blender dev team can get feedback on how the tools function in a production environment. Overall, more artists seem to want Blender sculpting to be more like Zbrush (which, like Blender, leans “technical” and is very well regarded by professional artists) and less like emulating traditional sculpting, or otherwise lacking in technical features.

I think there’s an argument to be made that by and large, 3D art is an fairly technical art by its nature, and tends to attract a relatively large proportion of technically minded artists.

Digital mediums tend to skew more technical than their traditional equivalents. This is both because the digital element adds a lot of potential possibilities that don’t exist in the physical world, but also because creating a 1:1 workflow that matches the real world methodologies and results without fiddly settings to finetune control is problematic if not impossible - and probably not desirable to most digital artists anyway.

2D is older as it predates computers, and has lower technical requirements - both in material and execution. You can do 2D with a paper and pencil, or a computer with significantly lower hardware specs than you’ll want for 3D. We pretty much all explored 2D art first as children with our crayons and fingerpaints, well before we learn to use computers.

Additionally, starting from scratch a 2D image can often be produced faster than a 3D image, and doesn’t require as broad a range specialized knowledge. Though if you have a sequence of images 3D assets can be re-used for faster output than drawing by hand every time. That said, you can draw a new shirt for a character or alter it’s design much quicker than you can model it, and you don’t have to rig it in 2D either.

Let’s say you wanted to create an image of a mage doing magic in a forest. In 2D, one person can make a professional quality illustration with that prompt starting from scratch in some amount of time ranging from a day to maybe a week, depending on their style and technique.

For the 3D equivalent, starting from scratch, that’s less likely. In fact, the character, clothing, hair, rigging, texturing, lighting, and environment can each be their own specialty handled by a different artist in some productions - though probably not for a static image.

There may be more demand for 2D as well, and I think there’s potentially a wider variety of medium and use cases for it.

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Indeed, it might happen that programmers implement “their way” of how the tool should look like.
Which in return might not be that useful to an artist.
But this is much less the case than we might think, especially in a project like blender where there is a constant back and forth between artists ( especially Blender Studio artists) and developers.
And most developers tend to seek for users feedback anyway.

Tool design, and even more software design is a very tough subject, in a project like blender it’s much more easier to do little incremental changes rather than planning a complete UI rework.
Needless to say that in blender everything needs to be consistent. Maybe the best sculpt interface might look very simple with super intuitive tools. But in blender it needs to stay consistent with other editors for many reasons. That way it doesn’t look like 10 different software put together at least.

Blender way of doing things tries to find a middle ground between playfulness and technicalities.
It’s rather simple compared to other DCC, but it doesn’t over simplifies stuff and try to avoid limitations. Obviously it’s never perfect. Since it’s a very broad subject it’s probably difficult to give you a satisfying answer :smiley:

What makes you think so ? How many 2D arists are there and how many 3D ?
I was getting the opposite feeling, but it’s hard to tell really… It’s not because you see a lot of concept art /illustration on social medias that there more 2D artists. At least in video game and movie industry there is far more 3D artists needed than 2D…