SOFTWARE: NOMAD SCULPT
Glen Southern
Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He has been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 15 years.
youtube.com/c/SouthernGFX/videos
Paul Hatton
After graduating with a first-class computer science degree Paul has nearly 2 decades worth of experience in the 3D Visualisation industry. He’s worked freelance, as part of a team and leading a team of visualisers too.
Mike Griggs
Mike Griggs is a digital content creator with over two decades of experience creating VFX and CGI for a wide range of clients.
Pietro Chiovaro
Pietro is a freelance 3D artist and YouTuber. An expert in the creation of game assets and environments, he shares many of his creations on his channel.
Glen Southern replies
It would have been hard to imagine even getting this question a few years ago. The fact that we can now model and sculpt not only on a PC or Mac, but on an iPad or Android device these days, and of course in VR headsets, is mind blowing. The industry is changing at an accelerated pace and there are increasingly more and more methods of doing a job in 3D.
I use Nomad Sculpt in my commercial work almost every week now. Often I just want to model or sculpt something quickly and then pose it to help me work out a scene or a camera angle. If that’s a creature or monster, I would have one large mesh that I’d need to mask and deform to get the shape I need.
There is no rigging in Nomad Sculpt, so I’d have to go to a program like Blender or Cinema 4D to add a possible rig. But what if I’d created a hard-surface model such as a robot and wanted to pose that over and over again, even while I’m creating it?
In the latest version of Nomad Sculpt you can use the Scene menu to parent a model to the one above it. For example, if I made a shoulder joint and want to add the upper arm, I’d drop the upper arm under the shoulder joint and consider it as a ‘child’ of the shoulder joint. If I then add the forearm and drop that under the upper arm, that then becomes a child as well. This is now a chain, so if I move the shoulder joint, the entire assembly will move along with it.
This is called forward kinematics and it’s common in the 3D realm. All the major 3D packages have this feature, but there aren’t many on the iPad yet.
The tri
