Sculptris

This might go better in a different thread, but Sculptris was acquired by Pixologic a few ago, and although it doesn't have the feature set of ZBrush, the price to date is free, and I'd think would be of interest to folks who want to get into sculpting after solid geometry and parametric surfaces has worn thin.

I'd compare this free product to both Autodesk Mudbox and 3D Coat, not as feature-filled, but Scuptris has gotten me where I want to go more than once. If you just need to move surface areas and rotate and scale them, and don't want or need stencils and other tangentially related features...

Download Sculptris for the price of a user name and email address

They're really not phishing; they just want to send you a link to download, and to try to send you a regular newsletter.

This image is not displacement-mapped. I sculpted the coin's face with Scultpris and this is part of an animation inside C4D with GI and all that good stuff. :)

Attachment 93712



My Best,

Gary

There is a Sculptris forum at ZB central with lots of info and stuff as well.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/forumdi...ris-Main-Forum

That's some pretty nice sculpting Gare... :)

Hi Gare, are there any limitations to using this free software? It looks very good and I like the 3d painting feature. But free usually means not very good. Why would they give it away for free?

Hi ElixirBloue—

I think Pixelogic is giving the beta away for free, because:

1.) It's been in beta for such a long time I think Pixelogic is just leaving it as is, and giving it away for free as an enticement to upgrade to ZBrush...which is dumb because although they both can sculpt, the interfaces and features are entirely different. You want t work with a Pro tool like ZBrush, as ILM and other animation houses do, you choose ZBrush. You want to sculpt in an easy, intuitive way, but with limitations that ZBrush could provide...you go with simple and free.

2.) Scultris was developed by Tomas Pettersson because he had a private need as an artist to make a "modeling clay" program, and he's made several other 3D programs (applets, actually)...and he's a good-spirited individual and originally gave all his projects away to help other ambitious artists. I believe when ZBrush discovered the programs, it scared the living kah-kah out of them to have a powerful program like theirs out there for free,so they locked it up by licensing it.

In this case, "free" means you need to register at Pixelogic so they can send you SPAM email regularly, but then the program is free to download. You'll seen my work with the dubloons above...I have no regrets or problems with the features.

In a parallel example, when Xara released the first version of the drawing program, Mike Cowpland at the time CEO of Corel Corp. soiled his britches when he saw it and offered Xara a six year contract for distribution. Corel then "buried" Xara to avoid competition, by calling it the best Web Graphics program, and severely under-advertising it.

Get the copy and then bock email from Pixelogic to avoid spam-related headaches. It's really a fun program:




My Best,

Gart

:) This is really a cool program -- so easy!! Nice that you can use your models in ZBrush and further refine them if you want to also. I quickly modeled a fat cat head and rendered it out in Vue4.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gare

Hi ElixirBloue—

I think Pixelogic is giving the beta away for free, because:

1.) It's been in beta for such a long time I think Pixelogic is just leaving it as is, and giving it away for free as an enticement to upgrade to ZBrush...which is dumb because although they both can sculpt, the interfaces and features are entirely different. You want t work with a Pro tool like ZBrush, as ILM and other animation houses do, you choose ZBrush. You want to sculpt in an easy, intuitive way, but with limitations that ZBrush could provide...you go with simple and free.

2.) Scultris was developed by Tomas Pettersson because he had a private need as an artist to make a "modeling clay" program, and he's made several other 3D programs (applets, actually)...and he's a good-spirited individual and originally gave all his projects away to help other ambitious artists. I believe when ZBrush discovered the programs, it scared the living kah-kah out of them to have a powerful program like theirs out there for free,so they locked it up by licensing it.

In this case, "free" means you need to register at Pixelogic so they can send you SPAM email regularly, but then the program is free to download. You'll seen my work with the dubloons above...I have no regrets or problems with the features.

In a parallel example, when Xara released the first version of the drawing program, Mike Cowpland at the time CEO of Corel Corp. soiled his britches when he saw it and offered Xara a six year contract for distribution. Corel then "buried" Xara to avoid competition, by calling it the best Web Graphics program, and severely under-advertising it.

Get the copy and then bock email from Pixelogic to avoid spam-related headaches. It's really a fun program:




My Best,

Gart

---

I always doubt free stuff because they always come with strings attached. I tried the free program and it's actually free. The only thing i had to put up with were the incessant emails but that's manageable. I've been working on my anumation skills and i might upgdare to the ZBrush, which is actualy their end goal.

Well, your is the first post in two years, but I started the thread, so I might as well chip in here.

Sculptris is still available for free here, and because this download is titled "Alpha 6", I think it's safe to say that Pixelogic decided to abandon parallel development with their flagship, ZBrush. Pixelogic did some UI tweaking, and added a format called GOE or something that allows Sculptris files to be worked with in ZBrush, which they hope you'll eventually buy.

Now, when you sign up for the free download (no strings except you tender an email address), you can opt out of the sales emails. I don't know what anyone else does, but for friendly but nagging email, I use a Google account as a burner account. Company emails don't make it to my door.

I also recommend one of the best free spam blockers around, been using it ever since Cloudmark got greedy and dropped their free version. Which is not only dumb for window-browsing currency, but users of any account help them define a wide spam base every time you report that letter from Nigeria thing. :)

It's called Mail Washer Free, very robust and catches 90% of my spam, and I don't see them killing off the free version. There's a prompt, not really a full-blown nag, every once in a while, not a problem.

I hope this helps anyone who wants to move up from primitives and Booleans to actual 3D sculpting in a capable, free program that can export beautifully to our coin of the realm OBJ.



Attachment 118487

Thanks Gare good info on this thread, I will give mail washer a try. I have had Sculptress for years but rarely use it myself.

Because I'm not very good at sculpting in 3D,

1.) I practice and try to learn, and

2.) It's very therapeutic, just gooshing a sphere into an unrecognizable lump.

I did this today, and I promise it offers some release. My credit card was suddenly blocked because the amount was atypical for my activity. I had to get on the walkie talkie THREE times before someone at Citi found a way to do something to lift the block.

Scuptris helped, really.


Attachment 118492



Here's a big CTRL+ALT+DELETE for Citi.

And I hope you were in the middle of something.

:)

-g

Hm. I know this thread is a couple years removed from the last post, but considering Zbrush has only recently released a new version (2019) and Sculptris is now fully integrated into Zbrush, it might be a good time to talk about a little history regarding Sculptris... Sculptris was originally created by Tomas Pettersson as an "alternative" to Zbrush style sculpting. It was one of the first sculpting packages which did not require you to subdivide the mesh into millions of polygons to get the detail you needed. It has a brilliant method of adding detail as you sculpt, which was previously thought to be impossible with the technology of the day. However, with some very clever mathematical algorithms and programming, Tomas created what was to become a technological breakthrough in digital asset creation. Pixologic (Zbrush) noticed the brilliance and simplicity to this style of sculpting and immediately scooped Tomas up to work for them under the Pixologic umbrella. At that time, the software known as Sculptris was still only in Alpha stage, not even a Beta yet. Pixologic didn't want the Sculptris software as much as they wanted the technology behind it. So they offered Sculptris as a free download to get people interested in sculpting, and have since integrated the tech into their flagship Zbrush, along with enhancements and improvements to the feature sets which were part of Sculptris. Sculptris PRO is now a fully fleshed out feature within Zbrush, and combined seamlessly with all the existing brushes, alphas and features of Zbrush itself.

Thanks for this information luxxeon... I remember when this app first came out... a few of us here at TG played around with it for a bit... then again, we also had ZBrush, so it was fun to test drive, and then back on the lot sort of thing... do you work with this toolset within ZB currently?

FWIW, if your budget is a whole round number approaching zero, the 2011 iteration of Sculptris is still available, zero support (fair enough), but free and a good self-training area for that big jump to Z Brush.

Sculptris Win and Mac


Attachment 125586

I used a forensic modeling program to do a rough 3D sculpt, then detailing, then texturing, and then into modo for lighting and rendering. No, it's not up to the finesse other, more experience 3D portrait artists do, but I know how to juggle. Can they? :)

I must commend Pixelogic for leaving a legacy product up, not for 8 years. Some manufacturers close the door the split second a new, more expensive program c0omes out, and I'm not picking on any specific company Adobe.


My Best,

Gary

Just downloaded it, and I'll play with it as soon as I have time, see what I can do with it... ;)

This was our fun effort using scuptris back in the day... DoDo Bird.. lol... not our cup of tea, but I am sure that others will take to this sculpting app with some real vigour. Love to see some other member's worx here . Cheers

Sculptris can bring new experiences to me personally as well as others when I first started owning and using it.
Good!

Hi Tim—

I just looked and my suspicions were confirmed; yes, you can download an alpha of Sculptris which is about a decade old, at Softonic

But Pixelogic bought it quite a quile back and transmogrified the3 product into (free) ZBrush mini-core, which has a $$$ big brother they push, but that's not the point.

ZBrush mini-core has updated tools, can export to OBJ, and the people DO update it. I just received a new version (you need to register) with quite significant number of new operations.

Free ZBrush mini-core

Attachment 131377




Also, also, Autodesk offers a free basic sculpting program called MeshMixer MeshMixer, which appears to be a new development and not Mudbox, which they acquired ages ago. The unique thing about this as an entry-level sculpting program is thast you can import an OBJ file and mess with it...hence "mesh mixer".

Attachment 131378

Happy sculpting, in any case.
—g

On another note, you guys might check out a site called opensea.io

This is a site for listing and selling NFT (non fungible tokens). People all over the world are marketing NFT images, a huge amount, images they did not create and are using to make money.

A colleague of ours pointed out quite a few of our stereogram images that were being offered on the site. I made a list of mine and had them all removed.

Most of these people have no concept of copyrights (and of course all my copyright info was cropped out) and they just think if it's on the web it's good to go.

Some explanation of this vaporware thing called an NFT https://www.investopedia.com/non-fun...ns-nft-5115211

Yours is a good shout-out for all content creators, Og.

As soon as yu become addicted even in the least to Crypto-currency, you begin to play a stock market that is weighted heavily against the investor.
My advice, not than anyone has asked, is to keep selling what you're selling on reputable site stores, and when someone comes around advising you that NFAs or similar are a great way to make money quickly, ask them who is at the top of the pyramid.

OoG

I agree. And there is so much stuff on that site most of those people will not see a dime.

We put a bunch of our stereogram images on shutterstock.com, a legitimate stock image site, thinking we would get rich. So far I think our royalties have not gone over $20. Max.

This is trending, Og: SMB—small to medium businesses—are actually giving up selling off their own web page, and migrating towards social media, getting a corporate account, and more or less "set it and forget it".

I make precious little over my font store over on Creative Market, but then again, I don't work it at all. It's for lunch money, but I must say, the conglomerate of online graphics resources ain't a bad place for your goods or mine. Create a number of suitable for framing stereograms and then gradually offer custom work.

They're always giving away free content, and I'm always downloading it, and that's the classic "bait and switch" from advertising. You download a "loss leader", then they "getch" before you check out with something tailored for to your tastes before you check out.

I'm not a sucker, but I will buy useful things. Example: a digital sculptor posted a beautiful collection of the four elements. I really don't have the time to learn how to do this myself, I think at the time they were $12 for the four.

I think the maxim is, "You get less than what you pay for, and as a vendor, you get less than you want."

;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

This might go better in a different thread, but Sculptris was acquired by Pixologic a few ago, and although it doesn't have the feature set of ZBrush, the price to date is free, and I'd think would be of interest to folks who want to get into sculpting after solid geometry and parametric surfaces has worn thin.

I'd compare this free product to both Autodesk Mudbox and 3D Coat, not as feature-filled, but Scuptris has gotten me where I want to go more than once. If you just need to move surface areas and rotate and scale them, and don't want or need stencils and other tangentially related features...

Download Sculptris for the price of a user name and email address

They're really not phishing; they just want to send you a link to download, and to try to send you a regular newsletter.

This image is not displacement-mapped. I sculpted the coin's face with Scultpris and this is part of an animation inside C4D with GI and all that good stuff. :)

Attachment 93712



My Best,

Gary

---

I'm impressed I tried the prog. and still have it but NEVER could I ever do anything like that.

.....
Larry, read your tag line!

Never give up!

Hey, I started modeling in 1992, after a hip operation, so I had little to do other than use my first computer and something called Macromedia's MacroModel.

And I've kept with the art of 3D modeling and rendering for close to 30 years.

You are a very gifted artist, Larry, and you chose your media a long time ago. Give Sculptris 30 years and have a hip operation and you're all set :)

Seriously, I was originally hired as an Art Director on Madison Avenue, and physical drawing remains my love. But computers, with the right software, are so damned FUN that a film director, whose film I worked on, told me that I'm a Jack of all Trades and a Mediocre Master of All trades.

He meant it as a compliment.

You, Larry, have a particular artistic calling that no one else can match or imitate, because it's all about you.

It's self-expression, in a very directed and mature way.

Hey, download any of these modeling programs, take a tool that can draw polygons away from the surface, and do this for an hour or so and it's very therapeutic regardless of the result. Mangling things is a great stress-reliever. :) See attached,

Attachment 131384


...annnnd, this is getting a little off-topic. Let's start an O/T on "The Artist", what motivates us, and screw any specific application, huh?

No disrespect to Xara or MAGIX. It's just that I was a physical artist way before (okay, a little before) computer graphics programs.

Excellent idea Gare.

Should I bring it up with The Administrator?

I know her.

Lol, I am sure you do :D Now I am wondering as to how you are doing Gare?