Further Studies in Sculptris

[RKapuaala]

This topic was originally introduced by Darko. I've been searching for a good FREE sculpting software for a long time now and I've got to say I am hooked on Sculptris. After a few pointers from darko and many hours worth of work trying to get the sphere into something approximating the human figure I saved that rough sculpt and started this bearded man one adding details. The more I work on it the faster I get and the easier it gets to bring out more and more detail. I have to say, having poor eye sight in my old age has really effected my ability to sculpt small figures, but with sculptris size is relative. I can zoom in so close you would need a microscope in real life to see that much detail. Here is my progress so far on my male humanoid figure. Please be critical and keep me on track. Keep in mind I am doing a static pose because eventually I will rig this figure and make it assume poses in DAZ3d. Then I can export those poses to object files and hopefully have them printed in 3d.

 

[pokrad]

Great start !!! It is easy to be hooked

 

[RKapuaala]

Thanks Darko Now that I'm hooked they will probably start charging me for it. I worked some on the hands last night. I got two fingers done and when I started to move on to the third, my system slowed down. I looked at the poly count and it was almost 60,000. I used the reduce brush and took away almost 35,000 polygons leaving around 25000. My system went back to normal. I render this image to make sure I didn't take away the wrong ones before I saved my progress.

It looked okay so I added a little more detail to the two I'd already finished before moving on to the ring finger.

I originally started the hands out as flippers like the feet. But I had a hard time sculpting the flipper into reasonable fingers so I reverted back to the method I used to make the whole figure and that is to crease and pull the appendages out. Here is a shot of the pinky finger as I pull it out of the main part of the hand.

After I get a rough shape on the pinky finger I will start with the thumb and start refining the sculpt. The cool Mask that Darko used to animate his sculpt can also be used to protect finished pieces of the sculpt; sort of like backing polymer clay, only you can unback these pieces by choosing invert.

 

[pokrad]

There is one more thing I use to get the places that are hardly visible- for instance inside of his leg. First I break symetry, it warns that it's usually one-way operation, I say OK.
Then press "H" and left-click on the empty space still holding the "H" key, drag the mouse so the rectangle covers the left leg. Then release the mouse and left leg will disapear-no longer in the way. Now I sculpt inside of the right leg. When finished, Press CTRL+H to get back unvisible left leg
and click the symetry icon again, and voila: work that I did on right leg gets translated to the left.
Now remember, actual work must be done on the right side of the sculpt, otherwise you will loose all you work after returning to symetry mode...

Great work BTW, I had a real trouble with fingers and still not satisfied...

 

[RKapuaala]

Darko,,,, I do not remember that trick from the manuscript, but I was so excited I blew through it. I'll have to read over again. It would be much better than masking the parts. When you say right side, do you mean the figures right or my right which is the hand next to the enter key on my keyboard.

 

[RKapuaala]

I'm fairly satisfied with this and feel like at this point I can move on to the feet. Now that I know that sweet key board trick I should be able to get a little bit more detail on those fingers.

I find that the rotation tool is a life saver for the fingers. I wish I could twist clay without erasing all my work cause it is so easy to miss align things when you are working close up.

 

[pokrad]

Darko,,,, I do not remember that trick from the manuscript, but I was so excited I blew through it. I'll have to read over again. It would be much better than masking the parts. When you say right side, do you mean the figures right or my right which is the hand next to the enter key on my keyboard.

My right side (figure left), if you do it on your left it will be erased after symetry is enabled again...

You did much better job on the fingers then I did

 

[RKapuaala]

Thanks. I've been working in 1:12, and smaller scales so long my hand sculpting is a bit lax

 

[RKapuaala]

I breezed through the rough construction of the feet and started to refine it when an overwhelming urge to rig came over me and I stopped right here.

The toes are spread out to make them easier to rig. Next I needed to export the figure to an object file and modify the center and size of the figure to make it a good fit for Daz. Then I needed to do a sanity check to see how close I was to the proportions of other daz figures.

Looks pretty close. I'll have to do a little adjusting, but I should be able to transfer a pre-existing skeleton into this mesh and with a few minor adjustments and the addition of a few extra bones, I'll have a fully posable sculpt. So from past experience I'll say one to two days to complete the rigging, as long as real life doesn't get too much in the way.

 

[RKapuaala]

I recently upgraded to DAZ3d studio 4. For the price it is an incredible piece of software (got for free) If I had to pay much more than 50 dollars for it, it would just be alright. One of the most annoying things I've encountered since I started using DAZ a couple of years ago is that with each version release they change the UI, and the directory structure. Most annoying is where they keep their geometry from one release to the next, and then how you get to access content. That being said, I spent a whole day trying to figure out where all my rigging tools were and my old figure templates. Turns out I couldn't use the old templates That meant I had to rig using the new tools which were hard to find and which seemed a bit limited and exactly what you could do. They also changed the work flow, but I finally got it rigged enough for this extreme joint test. I'll work more on the deformations and weights as I get use to how to work in this new interface.

 

[RKapuaala]

So, I got that first figure all rigged, and it poses just fine in DAZ4, but when I exported it to Scuptris and tried to do additional modifications to it, I got an error dialogue box that there were too many conections to a vertex... Apparently, they only allow 24. The figure was so heavy with Polygons 450k it took a long time to load into DAZ so I figured, and maybe incorrectly that figure was just too big, so I started cleaning it up till I got down to 180 polygons and rerigged the whole thing.

I thought I might be able to transfer the previous rigging to the new low count mesh, but no luck (its possible I just don't understand the transfer) So, it was back to rigging from scratch.

Before I tot too involved in re rigging a whole mesh, I decided to check that the rigging I already did, (chest, neck, head, collar bone) could be posed and then exported to object file I could work on in sculptris and as the picture above show. As you can see from the pic above, it worked. So Thursday I started in seriously rigging it again, then posed and again with the too many connection errors,,,, granted it was a pretty crazy pose and some of the deformations weren't exactly spot on. So I'm thinking maybe the size of the mesh is less important than the deformations. I'm going to get to the bottom of this and updat. BTW,,, if this is just TMI and folks thinking I should just stop chronicalling my experients with sculptris, feel free to reply to this thread that I'm boring you and that I need to get a life and stop sculpting so much.

 

[RKapuaala]

BTW,,, Great work on the site,,, this new version is fantastic

 

[pokrad]

I sucesfully rigged 200000 vertex mesh (2,1MB) using Blender, imported back and with no problems continue to sculpt...
So it must be a DAZ thing (not size of the mesh), it probably does something to the mesh that Sculptris do not like ?

At least one member is reading Your posts, so my wote is: keep posting

 

[RKapuaala]

Thanks for the feedback Darko. I found the problem. It wasn't size it was brains. I am so unused to the new daz interface, I messed up and ruined the index face groups and didn't even realize it. So,,, I guess a lot of those orphaned vertices looked like they were connected to something. I redid the figure,,, yet again and so far it is working. It took me playing around with the Daz stock figures to realize what I did. The break was good, I tortured that figure and then textured it in sculptris and came up with this little scene.

The playing around proved that the pose did not matter or the size of the file,,, serioiusly look at all the polygons flying off her in everydirection, so I reviewed my face groups and found out the neck was gone from the face set, but still present in the character hierarchy of bones and in the weights. I did a quick remedy and came up with a file that was posed (lame pose, but posed) that I can import into Sculptris and add clothing too.

Its a lame pose, but I couldn't resist adding some clothing to him. This is a good start, but I think I will stop and have him strike a better pose.
I really like the clean look of the site now. I never saw those 3 alerts I had before. I guess they were there for a while.

 

[RKapuaala]

Did a better pose last night. I need to refine the weight maps but it is workable.

I was looking in the directory for the documentation to see how to manipulate and combine two object like the plane you can add to the scene, when I ran across this

In the models directory. Dooh! that would have saved a lot of time I really gotta start reading the documentation before I start using the product.

 

[RKapuaala]

Taking a little break from sculpting and rigging. I decided I needed to test the texturing tool in sculptris which is aptly named PAINT. A little bit about myself. I started loving 3d modeling back in the day when they were still being displayed as a bunch of lines on a black and white or black and green monitor. I even study C++ programming with the intention of building 3D models and animation. When vrml came to the WWW I jumped in head first and joined a project sponsored by SGI called Irish space where I built a couple of humanoid figures in vi on my old Linux box point by point and then animated it. So, I've had experience with texturing figures and scenes. I've done it in a text editor and I've used a lot of the tools that were available including some expensive stuff like 3D studiomax and Lightwave 3D to name a few. Those tools were a bear to figure out (I could almost do it faster in a text editor) and the results were often un predictable.

This image was rendered by Sculptis as I worked on the texture map in the Paint tool. Talk about intuitive (I feel like a freaking commercial for pixlogic) It is just like painting a figure in real life. The only difference is, that I don't have to clean my brushes, put away my pigments or wait between coats to let paint dry. What you see her is 5 minutes worth of painting, having never used the tool. The usual tools for this involve a screen that shows a UV display of your 3d model against a checker board grid. The hard part used to be unfolding all those polygons so that they fit logically on the grid and would display correctly. In a text editor I would usually take a set of index_face sets and assign their cooridinates to the exact pixel locations in an image file. The UI was suppose to do that for you but didn't. It is very unintuitive way for doing things if you are used to holding a paint brush and mixing your own colors and laying them down, I hated and still hate that method, but Sculptris must have been designed by someone who actually painted a figure. So the real test is, how does the UV map work across various 3D displays. Well, I tried it in DAZ and here is what it looks like.

Okay, not quite the same. I need to work on my lighting technique a little but the important thing is that the texture is seamless. Even the best of apps that I have used would work fine in the native application, but when you exported the uv map and texture out to another application you would often get very minor overlaps in the texture and the default color or sometimes a scrambled mess. I am happy to say, this is not so with Sculptris.
If you are still reading this you are probably wondering where the heck I am going with this.... well, there is technology that will 3D print texture maps onto a 3D object shapeways.com is one of those to name a few. Its still a little crude compared to most the figure paintings I've seen on this site, but give them time, like the UV mapping they will perfect it and when they do, I want to be ready.

This a poor image but what it is are two of the same figure I made modifying vertices of an existing humanoid mesh one or several points at atime in a 3D modeling application. It took me months to build this figure and then I sent it to a friend of mine who has a 3D printer and he prints them out for me to the scale I want. Someday, I want to be able to send a painter figure to a 3D printer and have it printed in color.

 

[gordy]

Very cool Richard, thanks for sharing

 

[RKapuaala]

I just figured out how to use the DAZ genesis figure in sculptris. If you export them without any of the group names, texture maps UV sittings to a wavefront object file you can open them in meshmixer and run the inspector and fix all.
You will loose your eyeballs, teeth tounge nails etc.... but the figure is intact in what ever pose you want to put them in. You can also import the same saved object file into sculptris and modify the likeness (set the detail level to zero) and then just pose then import it back into DAZ transform it into a figure and then transfer another genesis figures rigging to it then you can use all the standard DAz poses to begin your pose and make slight alterations from there.
You can then save that that figure (preferrable in its default zero state) as a character file and reuse it any time you want.
Once you have posed that (now) character you export it to an object file (no uv information or group names etc) then import into mesh mixer. Use the select brush to select the body, then modify the selection so that it selects all the connected polygons of the body. Press x to remove the body, and you have the teath and the eyeballs left. Fix them, export them to an object file, next click the back option till you have the highlighted body, then invert the selection and x out the eyes teeth eyelashes etc and then fix the body mess with the inspection tool and then import the teeth and eye balls and append them to the mesh export the whole thing as an object file again and open it in sculptris and put some clothes on it.
I just started a sculpt of King Kalakaua using this technique and I did not have to tweak my existing meshes body type, because I was able to do that easier in DAZ.

Of course I can't repose him with the hair, but the hair and mutton chops are separate so I can save them as a separate object and put them back on when I repose the default mesh. Oh, and I did not append the teeth to this file because they won't be visible. I just appended the eyeballs.

They work much better than the spheres because they instantly go right where they are suppose to, you don't have to mess with them,,, only don't append them in Sculptris. Sculptris just wants to resize them wether you enable or disable the resize option or not.

 

[RKapuaala]

Believe it or not, this is a sculpt I did in sculptris and it is one contigious mesh, I animated it in DAZ3d using their canned animations. I'm still trying to figure out why this sculpt is working so well when others end up looking either like a taffy pull or a porcupine.