Sculptris

[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

[Crow Haven]

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.

[aimeusdietger]

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.

[Gare]

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.

[wizard509]

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.

[Gare]

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.






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

And I hope you were in the middle of something.

:)

-g

[luxxeon]

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.

[gidgit]

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?

[gidgit]

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

[timblank]

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