New blender sculpting is coming soon.

michaliszissiou

Already here, in it's alpha release if you like to have some fun. It's stable alright.
read about it. The whole topic is interesting.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257749-The-Dynamic-Topology-Branch-is-here!&p=2168306&viewfull=1#post2168306
Download experimental but stable enough builds if you know a little about blender.
For OSX, 64 bit
http://graphicall.org/979
For WIN, choose 32 or 64 bit
http://graphicall.org/962
http://graphicall.org/963

Meanwhile, it seems that it's the more innovative system I know.
Let me explain why. It looks like another sculptris.
But,
The ability to sculpt under GI pathtracing, the ability to see under physically correct lighting what you sculpt in seconds... this is innovative alright. *
The ability to vertex paint without the use of UVs,
to have a fast box blended mapping for a fast texture,
to even UV and paint directly on texture map,
to have many sets of these and combine them without using the archaic Ps layers methods but to use the cycles node system...
to directly sculpt on beautiful ready made (by me) procedural shaders...
All these are innovating indeed. IMO.
Meanwhile the following are blender only projects-ddodles. No other software is used.

the alter ago of my dog LOL

*some personal thoughts on sculpting, art, 3d etc...

@unknownuser said:

"Sculpting has little to do with anatomy or such things. Does it sound heretic?
Sculpting has to do with scale. But what "scale" really means?
Sculpting is all about light and shadows. It's how it captures the light. There isn't any short of clipping path around a mesh, this may exist in our imagination only. Light "eats" the mesh and in the end we have a space full of shapes of light and shadow. This is what a renderer provides, this is what you'll notice in a real museum (under the influence of such ideas)
So, to keep watching the surrounding space while sculpting, trying to achieve a flow of shapes all around, to find references of the surrounding shapes into your sculpt... this is the essence of sculpting.

A little about drawing/2d painting.
Have a square piece of paper, draw a shape. What you have done is to divide the square face of the paper in two pieces of equal importance. "

pilou

True cool as always!

I can't imagine what the artitsts of the past have done with it!

By Van Eyck

Rich O Brien

Wonderful sculptures Mick

michaliszissiou

Pilou, you...
Indeed this was the reference for the turban and possibly for the face, though I just made it from memory.
ha ha
Pilou, the greatest and the kindest troll around the net.
Van Eyck's tremendous portrait in national gallery of london.

michaliszissiou

Thanks Rich
Why don't you join the club?
The more civilized people there, the better it is.

Rich O Brien

I lurk....

Loving the Grease pencil and Bsurfaces

michaliszissiou

Yeah
eh, I mean the sculpting club.

pilou

Cool works

You are some caustic!

michaliszissiou

The dynamic topology blender-branch is almost ready. There're some less important bugs for the moment but it perfectly works.
Surprisingly perfect, I could say. Bye bye sculptris. This is what happens when a company like pixologic buys a free app and stops development.
Some more studies. All dyntopo sculpts ~600-900K, shaded and rendered in cycles-blender (I updated the older nvidia with a decent ATI these days )

and a sculptris ~1.2M just to show how better details you can sculpt in blender using half of the faces.

mwm5053

These look very cool, would like to get into blender so I went to the link for osx and found several differat builds and since I know nothing about blender maybe someone can tell me the difference in freestyle ,and others on this website thanks

http://graphicall.org/os-x

Rich O Brien

Those are different builds than the normal Blender. To get regular latest build for Mac OSX go here...

http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

mwm5053

Thanks all

michaliszissiou

This is a good one, latest mac build. (more advanced on cycles renderer section than the official)
http://graphicall.org/856
You won't find sculpting - dynamic topology though.
It's experimental build. So, try this one
http://graphicall.org/979
You may have as many builds installed as you like. They even share same preferences.

Learning curve in blender may take long, as Pilou explained. More than a year. But think otherwise. Blender is a massive app, a sculpting tool, an editor, an animator, a renderer (two or more renderers actually), a compositor, a video editor, camera tracking. Almost everything. In professional quality. Take one at a time. I would suggest for sketchup users to install the free TIGs obj exporter and start importing and learning Cycles render engine. How to navigate, set up scenes. Then, it's about time LOL, learn UV unwrapping. You gonna love it after all we have seen in SU. Don't forget to ask for help. And login in blenderartists.org (blender community forum)

andybot

michalis, this is amazing! Really wish I had more time to tinker, but paying work comes first, and family, so the only thing left is sleep I am getting my head around the nodes though, it's not as complicated as it seems

Bryan K

I first experimented with Blender years ago. Loved it! But yes, the learning curve is very steep. Due to time problems (as usual) I was very happy to find SketchUp and become productive must faster than Blender.

But I hope to eventually go back to Blender because it IS so versatile. It can even make games!

pilou

@unknownuser said:

I know nothing about blender maybe someone can tell me the difference in freestyle ,and others on this website

For the prog itself ?
It's the most amazing polygon subdivision modeler prog at this day!
He can makes quasi all from a cube to a Movie and games and like Sketchup a plugin or a new function born all the days!

And it's free!

But there is a little "but"
The learning curve is not in minutes like Sketchup, or hours or weeks or months ; Minimun a year if you fall in love with it!

Of course it's free and that is also one reason of its success like Sketchup

pbacot

Great sculpting. I thought I asked before but curious why do you use the computer for this? You obviously can do this by hand. I would think it it more direct by hand in clay or wax. Or is it?

pilou

Maybe the CTRL + is not the same and more light (not heavy) than marble
And less problem for the health-enhancing!
And some times won if you want make some serial editions, you have yet the file!

And no need some tools

michaliszissiou

@unknownuser said:

I thought I asked before but curious why do you use the computer for this? You obviously can do this by hand. I would think it it more direct by hand in clay or wax. Or is it?

Not that simple. I'm a lazy artist.

for real sculpting, you need a studio, far away from neighbors, especially if you work at night and on stones.
I'm a 2d artist, in 3d sculpting, I found a nice tool for studying drawing.
Yeah the tools, funny, because such tools exist in digital form too. ha ha

Anyway, computers is just another medium. Some people asked me once, why watercolors? You can do better in oil painting. (and ask for better prices actually )

@ Bryan K
It's about blender sculpting, which is much different than modeling. It's not fair to compare it with SU, artisan for instance, we're talking about huge meshes, retopology, UVs and baking workaround.
After all these last years, blender became a much better app than it was. I don't see any reason to be more productive in SU. After all, blender 2.6x has pushpull and inset tool (F) as well. LOL (it also supports ngons which I, personally, find it a little useless).
We also have two fine artists on this forum (french, je ne l'oublie pas, pilou ), who use both SU and blender.

pilou

Alas no I don't use very much Blender, I would like but this prog don't loves me!
I know how it works but every time I open it, I have all forgotten!