It’s interesting how productive one can be without the constant distractions of the internet. I’m alive and well in my new place and enjoying it a lot, but thanks to incompetent phone companies I’ve been disconnected from the net for the 2 1/2 weeks I’ve been here. Hopefully I’ll be back online within the next couple of days, so sorry if I’ve been a bit out of contact, I’ve got a huge backlog of emails to get through.
Apart from cleaning up a demo reel, some coding and of course unpacking, the other day I did a little test of the in-development multi-res sculpting tools, currently being constructed by Nicholas Bishop, who’s doing a sterling job as part of Google’s Summer of Code. I’m using a build that’s about 3 or 4 weeks out of date, but even so, it works very nicely already.
Although it doesn’t have many of the features and speed of an application like Zbrush, at least from my experience in both apps, it’s quite competitive for a lot of purposes. The tight integration of the sculpting tools with the rest of Blender is a huge plus – being able to step down from level 7 to level 4 subdivision, use Blender’s UV tools to unwrap the mesh and having the UV layout propagate up to the higher res surface is just fantastic. At the rate things were going previously, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current development version is a lot better, too. This little test below took an evening to sculpt and another day or so for the remaining stuff like lighting, skin shader, colour and bump map painting. My poor little Powerbook G4 can’t handle ungodly amounts of polys, this mesh being only 120k, but still the results are very nice, especially with a bump map on top, the old fashioned way.
Leave a Reply