Sculpting - The easiest way to learn and begin? (program wise)

Hi all, a few things:

1- I've read over the forums and I keep looking for "Hi Im new and interested in sculpting, what is the easiest program to use?" And then none of the community can manage to give the same answer because they're all relating THEIR ease of use (which has come over 5 years) to program X.

2- I am not concerned over price.

3- I do not want this program for ANYTHING more than sculpting for SL.

4- I do not want to learn anything else than what is needed for SL sculpties.

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Now, going off that:

I don't know anything related to this business, so all this talk about UV and whatnot just confuses me and extra features and what not makes it worse. Im not looking for a career in 3D, I just want to make cannons, rocks, and what not... simple stuff.

So with that said, what is the EASIEST program to learn (and by easiest I mean it has a GENTLE learning curve) for beginners that creates sculpties without a head ache? Im not looking for my eyes to pop out here over trying to make a rock sculptie.

Also I'd settle for something viewed as a bit harder if there is excellent tutorials and newbie guides and such sufficient enough to get people off their feet and making sculpties, but I'm sure you all can understand my situation: every time I read a thread it has 10 people giving 11 opinions and people coming into the scene don't know what to try as a result.

And I'd prefer not trying them all, that's just a waste of time.

If you have links to good tutorial videos or such for whatever program, please post them too!

Thanks

Abrah, if you are looking for a consensus answer, I don't think there is going to be one. But why don't you try creating a poll post? You've done a pretty good job of describing your criteria. The one thing I can think of that you haven't made explicit is whether you are willing to trade off ease of learning for generality. For example, learning Rokuro is easier than learning Wings 3D, but you can't make an arbitrary sculpty in Rokuro.

Sculptypaint092 is free and the program was written by an SL artist. It will give you some (maybe a lot) of the basic concepts for creating sculpties and is easy to get started with since there are tutorials at the website you go to for the download. You also just play around with it and get a pretty good feel for what is involved in making a scupty. I don't think it's powerful enough for anything very intricate or detailed........but I gather you are not interested in that anyway.

Google "sculpypaint092" for the website.

The EASIEST programs for learning shortterm sculptying are, handsdown, Rokuro and Sculptypaint. But because they are so easy, they are terribly weak in their features as well, because at some point, you will want to do something more complex, so _longterm_ the easiest programs are actually the high-end ones (ones that have a valid exporter), such as 3Dsmax or Maya. But if you want to learn something fast go for Rokuro or Sculptypaint.


In my personal recommendation is 3Dsmax 9, because of the excellent exporter 'Prim Composer', which is extremely powerful and constantly support as well as updated by the developer. There is a forum for posting questions and suggestions. You can make normal prims using it too. 3Dsmax 9 is also the most familiar to me with building in Secondlife, which helped me a great deal to learn it fast enough. Prim Composer is great, you can even import your builds you have made in Secondlife into 3Dsmax thanks to this tool and then export it out again into the world. 3Dsmax is also specifically designed for modelling mostly static objects, far more powerful than Maya in contrast which is aimed at animation, a useless concept when rather more concerned with creating a sculpty.

Considering 3dsmax is a industry standard in gamedevelopment you will find many resources and tutorials via Google on general modelling, very cool! Version 9 is the latest you would need to work with prim composer.

Autodesk 3Ds Max: http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax
Prim Composer: http://liferain.com/downloads/primcomposer/


All said and done, my opinions are my own, it is in my own experience the best choice from years of modelling, textures etc to be the best combo for Program and Exporter.

I think the largest support community is around Blender. It falls into the "bit harder" category and a fair few users start on one of the other packages before moving to Blender.

Blender will be more of a challenge to learn, but as far as I know, it's the most powerful sculptie solution there is. I put a lot of effort in making things as simple as possible for new users, so a lot of the complexity of sculpties is handled by the scripts. You still have the option of using advanced Blender techniques, but for simple sculpties such as rocks, you don't need to learn much.

There are a lot of good tutorials, including the videos from machinimatrix which are ideal for beginners.

And I'm currently building "Area 55" which should become a hub of information on using Blender with Second Life. I'll be holding regular events starting next year where I'll be sharing tips, techniques and developing an in world community to support each other.

As a short learning curve seems pretty high on your priorities, Blender is probably still not your first choice, but I hope to see you when you outgrow whatever you do choose

Yep,

Since there are sooo many ways to create sculpties and each program offers different options
and learning curves it sort of throws your question into the oversimplified category.
Sort of like asking what is the easiest way to draw a drawing?
Putting pencil to paper will do the trick, but then you find out about brushes or stencils or different kinds of paper and suddenly your options expand exponentially. It is a very similar
situation with sculpties.

With every approach your results will vary depending on your actions.

I would think most people would agree that Rokuro is one of the easiest if not The easiest.
So that is something you can try just to get a taste of it.

The thing to keep in mind is that every single program you use will have different rules about
what you can and can't do. That being said, once you learn the ins and outs of a few different ones you can experiment with breaking some of those rules that has led to new discoveries.
It most often results in pretty messy output however so keep that in mind.


Programs with built in exporters are pretty easy. In terms of producing a prim and making
a change to it and then just exporting it to a sculpt map.

A couple of those that come to my mind are:

AC3D - which is pretty easy to use as it is intended as a 3d beginners modeling program.

Hexagon 3d from DAZ - Is also easy to produce a sculpt map , yet takes a bit more effort
to learn all the tools, however it is much more powerful in terms of how many more options you have.

Then there are all the programs that utilize sculptie exporters as plug ins, many mentioned above.

Then there is Blender which bakes the texture right inside the program. Once you know what your doing it is pretty easy too, however not compared to the others. Its interface is pretty
much considered one of the hardest to learn in the entire 3d industry. However it is also one
of the most powerful with the sheer number of options you have.

Good Luck!

nuff said...

I use ac3d and I love it. For me it was fairly easy to learn.

http://www.inivis.com/