Jadon Lotinga, St. Louis
Before I answer this question, I want to make sure everyone is on the same page with regards to what sculpting even is. I began my 3D journey learning standard polygon modelling with a little hard-surface modelling thrown in. It was only later on, through a chance encounter with Sculptris, that I was exposed to this third way of modelling.
It’s an entirely different approach, but once mastered enables artists to create models that would either be impossible with traditional techniques, or so time consuming it would hardly be worth doing. The sculpting modelling workflow is widespread in both character and environment creation as these disciplines require a much more organic set of tools to achieve realism.
3D sculpting enables artists to treat their model like clay. This mouldable object can be pushed, pulled, grabbed and pinched with artists making a series of adjustments until they’re happy.
Every sculpting application adopts its own set of tools and workflows, but the industry leader, in my opinion, is ZBrush with Mudbox in second place. The aforementioned Sculptris appeared on the scene back in 2009 as a free alternative and quickly became popular among artists who wanted a free but capable application that could deliver great results. Blender isn’t, at its core, a sculpting program, although it does have the major advantage of being free. Another benefit of sculpting inside Blender is that artists have access to a set of production-ready polygonal modelling toolsets, which make the transition between the two much easier. In essence, artists benefit from the best of both worlds.
Blender also offers users a dedicated workspace for the sculpting workflow, ideal for gaining access to the exact tools you need rather than being exposed to a ton you don’t. Within the toolset, artists have access to 20 different brush types, plus multi-res sculpting support, dynamic topology sculpting and mirrored sculpting. Dynamic topology is par ticularly helpful as it not only enables artists to create complex shapes, but also ensures extra detail is only placed in the parts of the mesh that really need it.
In answer to this question, we’ll see how easy it is to get up and running with sculpting in Blender and
