1. #1
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    Smile Total newbie - never modeled before but need advice please

    Dear all,

    I have downloaded Sculptris to try modeling figures, props, well anything possible!

    I am interested to try making a ventriloquest puppet doll myself from scratch as I can't afford the one that's for sale at Renderosity by Cadman Studios. Well, something in that line as there aren't any available for free. I have found a free head though but that one is not very realistic as what I have in mind and one can't change expressions, movements of eyes, mouth, etc. thereon unless I take it over to Hexagon but I haven't tried that yet. Not even sure it will work!

    Do you think it's possible to create such a doll in Sculptris and maybe add morphs in another application? I have Daz Studio 4.8 Pro and Hexagon 2.5. To be honest I have never modeled any figures in any program at all! My only try of a model is a building I have done recently in SketchUp, but that's it!

    Any tutorials or suggestions, advice on how to create a head with all its features and the rest of the body? Anything on figure creating will be a great help.

    Please, don't suggest getting ZBrush as I am a pensioner and can't afford such pricey programs, well not currently.

    Your help and suggestions are much appreciated!

    Kind regards,

    Laura

  2. #2
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    Get a good free modelling program and just play around a bit. Youtube is choc-full of tutorials dealing with the subject of modelling 3d figures. Study some anatomy (I know, it's a ventriloquist puppet you're trying to achieve but facial anatomy knowledge will certainly help and not harm your work) Also download some models you think will be close to what you're trying to do and examine them. How they're put together, their topology, etc.

    Free programs I still use to this day-

    Wings3d- I've used this one since my very beginnings in 3d. It's simple to use and has some great features. My first human model was put together in it and then later taken into Zbrush to better block out the forms and sculpt. What's cool is NOW Wings3d has some sculpting capabilities. http://www.wings3d.com/

    Anim8or- Not as many features but still a nice little tool to have in your toolbelt. http://www.anim8or.com/

    Blender- Not really geared necessarily geared toward beginners. The interface would be rather confusing if you don't know what you're doing. Again, tutorials are quite abundant on the web. Blender also has some sculpting. https://www.blender.org/

    In short, don't get too discouraged when you seem to run into a brick wall. I still often times will wake up in the middle of the night and have a solution to a particular issue dawn on me. lol. Although the learning curve for modelling could seem quite steep at the beginning, once you get a handle on a few things, it's on like donkey kong, if you catch my drift. lol. Good luck and most of all.. play fearlessly and HAVE FUN!!

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    Just to add... Sculptris is a great program but a million triangles does not a good animated figure make. lol. It will need retopologizing, whichever program you choose to do it in. Sculptris' developer has talked about an autotopology feature but has not implemented it yet. Until then, you can certainly use the link I've provided for Instant Meshes above. Also, I must have missed that you've also got Hexagon....

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Teo9sFAoY

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    The autotopology feature, looked a lot like zremesher (before zremesher came out) so my guess is that feature became zremesher, as pixologic captured sculptris and enslaved his genius author (j/k but you know what I mean lol) I can be wrong though, maybe it was just a coïncidence.

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    Yeah, Sculptris is a 3D Doodle Pad, that's about it! .... if you learn to model in another app, UV-map and such, you can Use Sculptris to Paint your models! It's actually really good for that!, you can paint to the bump/Normal map, use Textures, Masks, Most of us who were there in 2009 when Sculptris first hit the scene, were very impressed, and hoping it would do what you're looking at. But the Triangle models don't bend well, Sculptris UV's Suck, and the triangle format doesn't have any useful things like Edge Loops or Poles. However, it is possible to use a simple Cube-extrude model in Blender along with shrink-wrap function to get a quad model similar to what you've molded, but things like eyes and teeth will need to be rebuilt.

    Personally I like Wings3D, but I'm using version 1.5.3 with the EXPerimental 64 Manifoldlab stuff. I once I realized that many of the functions in Zbrush could be done similarly in Wings3D, I started really getting to know it better. I model in Wings3d, mark my UV islands. Remap them in a program called Roadkill (does a better job), then take it back into Wings3D to Reorganize them and name Material groups. Then when needed I Paint them in Sculptris! ... Maybe I'll do a video......

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    Learn Blender, it has everything you need for this, and then more....
    • I don't speak English "by default", so...
    Cinema 4D Discord Channel

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    You can do what you are trying to do with Sculptris.
    Sculptris is perfectly capable of making mesh suitable for animation, and it's more fun than most other tools like it (honestly it's in a class of its own).
    Look at the Reduce Brush, Reduce Selected and turn on Wireframe, all in the second group of buttons, they are extremely good for reducing polycount and doing it selectively.
    Learn Blender as Regnas said above, you can make whatever you like in Sculptris and then bring it into Blender for rigging and other further work.
    Personally I do things like this:
    • Sculpt a person (or whatever) in Sculptris.
    • Send it into ZBrush for refinement and things like painting, mapping and all that sort of thing (objects need color and texture).
    • Send it into Blender for rigging, this makes it animatable, and it can be animated in Blender as well if I want.
    • Back into Zbrush for some other changes I won't go into.
    • And finally into KeyShot for rendering the final picture (or in the case of an animation, many pictures).


    It's actually an interesting process no matter what you do, and it's going to be a bit of work. Sculptris is, in my opinion, the best way to learn digital sculpting and will inspire you in a big way to learn to rig in Blender or some other program.

    What I think you might be looking at would be more like this:
    • Sculptris for sculpting (Blender has sculpting tools too but I won't comment on those).
    • Then into Blender for rigging (building a skeleton basically) saving what I think you need, "Blend Shapes".
    • Texturing, and material design and UV mapping and all that can happen in Blender as well...
    • Then into your animation program, though I suspect if you dig into it you will find that Blender is better than most other stuff.


    Sculptris is just about the best place to start and if you get into it you will possibly find yourself looking at the price of ZBrush a little differently.
    nope...
    I don't know what I'm doing but I'm doing it anyway.

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    @MaleaYing

    It could be a good combination, but he said he don't go with zbrush at the moment.

    So what he can do is to add another great tool in his arsenal, Autodesk Meshmixer (free) this program can do something similar to dynamesh, of course it's not as useful as dynamesh but if you really need an unified/remeshed object it do a pretty good job

    So my advice would be

    Sculptris for base sculpt, or base volume creation
    meshmixer to unify eventual multi part mesh into one (then refine in sculptris)
    Blender to perform retopology, UV unwrap and textures stuff
    Xnormal to bake maps
    Krita and or GIMP to refine textures

    final render (and eventually riggin) in blender with cycle

    at the end you have 5/6 programs that are all free, and together pack some punch
    so here is a completly free set of tools that can get you started and more.

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