What's the best tool for creating sculpted prims?

If money were no object, what's the best software for creating sculpted prims?

I've been teaching myself to use Blender, but the bleeding from my eyes and hoarseness from screaming in frustration is starting to get to me. Too, my default mode of taking a working .blend file and then poking it a bit at a time is becoming tedious.

I've read up on the possibilities on the wiki, but I'm very interested in what 3D experts have to say.

And by "best", I don't mean easiest-to-learn, I mean best-results with least-time. It doesn't take too long to use bad free software to cost me in billing what a good package would have saved.

Get Maya, watch the included training videos for how to use the interface, read the help file for the basics of using NURBS surfaces, and you'll be all set. It'll take practice to get good, of course, but you'll be using the software satisfactorily in a matter of hours.

That having been said, Maya's definitely overkill if all you ever plan on doing with it is sculpties, but since you said price was not object, presumably that's not an issue for you. Just be aware that Maya has literally hundreds of thousands of features you won't be using.

AUGH! no, dont get maya! if your eyes are bleeding from blender, you'r gonna loose em to maya..
ive been TRYING to get a decent sculptie out of maya for a few days now, and i keep having to take screaming breaks or risk loosing computer integrity.

i admit, i dont know the program that well, and have only gone through half of the tutorials, but its definatly not a user freindly, beginner platform. this is the advanced, highly technical version of a sculptie maker, and its starting to feel like overkill overload when i keep struggling with it.

if that dosent daunt you, then sure, maya is one of the best, and in the hands of an expert can yeild some gorgeous results (weather youll be able to get those results into SL is annothe thing entirly though.. nothing NICE that ive made has been exportable.

EIAS is the best -- used many times in hollywood. Maya has modeled many features of EIAS and has seen recent hollywood inclusion. EIAS and Maya recently have partnered, which is really good news as we can expect further studio progress. Your choice after those two is the more expensive 3DSMAX.

I like Amorphium, as it's user interface is very intuitive and doesn't ruin the creation flow. Until there is more direct scupltie and texture map combination output, you'll have to export an OBJ (or similar) and use an external converter.

I'd imagine the external converter option will become more popular once more advance features are present, like multiple scupties and projected texture maps from a single OBJ file.

my workflow is Silo+Zbrush, and using Wings3d to to create the original sphere and to export. UVMapper professional to uvmap the sphere for texturing in Zbrush.

Works fine every time. Sometimes I have to strip the model's materials by running it through UVMapper so that Wings doesn't choke on it during the export, but other than that, I think its the easiest for me.

I don't think the Maya method is easier than Wings.

Money is no object...hire an experienced professional and let him or her use whatever he or she prefers...

Well first off, even if money isnt an issue, your question has a complex answer. The question i return to you, is simply how much time do you want to spend learning software to get a good result out of what you're doing.

For straight form(sculpt texture) creation, 3dsmax seems to be the best, most powerful, and most specific at creating forms. Its one of the best traditional modelling platforms out there, has a clean interface, but is ultimatelly a professional level app. If youre having trouble with blender and wings, max is going to be magnitudes more difficult to utilize.

If you want to jump further to the areas of Advanced texture baking, procedural shaders, etc. The best combination is Maya 8.5 with the Turtle 4 renderer. This combo will set you back about 8 grand, but you will be able to leverage the full power of real time asset creation. The downside of this is that to do most of these things, most people go to school for a year or two, to a tech school like FullSail, VFS or gnomon. Learning it from books and tutorials the hard way will more than likely take much longer.

I've been teaching 3d apps for a couple years, and using them for a while longer. The software itself isnt the magic bullet by any means. The best advantage that you can have remains 2d artistry, the ability to paint incredible textures, and a deep understanding of form. Unless youre doing incredibly complex technical processes, the app you use to make sculpties is rather irrelevant. The only way it really matters is if you have prior experience in that app.

Just my two cents.

The sculpties themselves present the biggest limitation, Xenius and Chosen made some very good points. Keep in mind that 3d modelling has been around for a long time and that all these tools being mentionned can do SO MUCH MORE than sculpties. In fact to make sculpties you have to really dumb down the workflow to retain the uv mapped shape you're starting with. Most of the tutorials for the tools are only good up to a point but as soon as it says to cut, extrude, delete vertices, you may as well stop that tut...

All of the tools have some kind of demo version to try them out. I should qualify my statements by saying I am not an expert but a 3d hobbyist. Of the tools I have used, I hate to go against your original post, but blender is the fastest way to produce 3d models (I'm not saying easiest to learn) . With the combination of keyboard shortcuts and modelling tools that blender offers it presents an incredible option for non-pro 3d folks. I read a comment somewhere that said if you learn to use blender you will wish all your programs worked that way.

Z-brush would be my 2nd choice because it's so fun to use, astounding combination of modelling, painting for end results that are truly remarkable and some of the best digital art out there is produced from zbrush. Don't believe me? check out the pixologic website!!! But the catch with z-brush is if you're having issues with 3d then try 2.5d on for size your eyeballs will not only bleed but may pop out and explode!!!

-why

it well may be the best for overall 3D - but for doing sculpt textures I think this is incredible overkill, not to mention hard to learn.

Zbrush + Wings is a powerful combo. I am a big fan of using software that is accessible for artists, but still packs a wallop of features. Zbrush definitely falls in that bracket.

Texture baking - IMO is not necessary for sculpts when using Wings as the exporter, but its a nice to have for texture effects. You can get a good bang for your buck with Carrara and the Inagoni plugin Baker - for a heck of a lot less money. And my gemstone Carrara artwork I can put head to head with many a Maya render, and people's jaws drop to the floor when I inform them I did it with a "cheap" 3d app (Carrara Pro retails at $549 dollars )

Carrara + Zbrush will set you back about a thousand dollars altogether, the Inagoni plugin is pretty inexpensive at a whopping 35 dollars, and all of it being very accessible and quick to learn.

Zbrush http://www.pixologic.com/

Carrara Pro http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=4315&cat=331

Baker for Carrara http://www.inagoni.com/content.php?content.3

I think it's actually very easy for people with a traditional sculpting background - I glommed onto Zbrush like a cat to tuna sushi

Helps to have a Wacom tablet though - and I do

Not to hijack this forum into a software bigger-dick-than-though-off, but i wanted to quickly respond the the issue of Maya vs. Carrara.

Firstly, the point of this thread is the question of if money were not an issue what is the most powerful toolset. Attempting to say Hapatia that just due to your personal experience and abilities, the Carrara and a plugin are equal to Maya in terms of power of application and baking capabilities as arrogant and misleading.

An important feature set that Carrara isnt capable of is global illumination in the forms of Photon Mapping, Final Gather, Image Based Lighting with HDRI, etc. It is these features that truly leverage the advantages of baking over hand painting. Go over to the wiki page for Sculpted Prims and you can see sculpty couch of mine with baked ambient occlusion and final gather. This sort of lighting is not possible without a more expensive rendering package, plain and simple.

Yes, its overkill for most people, but if you're looking for the best most powerful solution, as well as the most comprehensive user-friendly system for baking in layers, Maya using Turtle 4 is the way to go.

-Xen

Perhaps, "Baking textures" needs to be broken down into the different influences on a texture.

If you don't care to "bake" any ambient or external objects colors or reflections onto to your object of focus, then you need none major 3D packages - Maya, 3DSMAX, Rhino, etc etc. These cost over $500.

If you are interested in the diffuse and being able to adjust the map on the mesh, along with the bumps, reflectivity, ambient colors, lighting, shadowns, there are programs like Amorphium, Zbrush, Mudbox, Silo.

Blender does it all for free but the UI is not intuitive.

Money being no object, the best solution is to hire someone to create a better importer than the plain sculpt map for SL. Being able to import OBJ (Wavefront) files is something I'm working on. As in the future, I bet SL will have shadows and lighting rendered automatically as found now in external scene renderers.

Photon mapping has been around for the last two versions, as has HDRI. It's only missing Final Gather.

Yes, there are more things that an external renderer can do (Turtle is an external renderer IIRC and doesn't actually ship with Maya - whereas the renderer for Carrara comes with it)- but for SL - is your average SL user actually going to use all these features? Nope. Users need tools that are easy to learn, and do the job reliably.

If I was going to do a motion picture - I'd get Maya. For the average 3d hobbyist - Maya is overkill and not easily accessible.

Price to performance - Carrara is a good buy and quick to learn. Maya is a good buy if you've got the time to spend to learn it and a need for all those features (SL doesn't really need them, and texture baking often produces contradictory lighting which makes things look worse, not better), and most don't have either the time or the money. You don't even need texture baking for making textures - talent in Photoshop and Zbrush can bring you a long way.

Photoshop is good to have to add any effects that any of the 3D renders don't do.

I still don't an advantage Zbrush has over Amorphium. Care to spot one or two?

I don't use Amorphium so I am not qualified to answer - but some of the complaints I've read have to do with things like the symmetry and modelling tools. Zbrush really has a lot of tools for working with meshes, and ZB3 just got even better. I'm looking forward to some of its subtools for working with multiple objects. Once I work with it more I can say more about it. I did my first sculpts in ZB2 - while I was waiting for my ZB3 to arrive (just did a couple days ago and I'm still messing with it)

I use Zbrush all the way through side by side with Photoshop, from texture start to finish, also for avatar texturing. The programs interface seamlessly, and Zbrush autoupdates automatically any changes saved in PS. Seriously for SL - I don't see anyone really needing more than PS and Zbrush for most things regarding textures, and Zbrush has a lot of uses besides just modelling sculpts - its great for avatar skins and clothing design too.

Carrara is something I use for other stuff, but sometimes I use rendered and baked textures from it in SL - particularly for gemstone effects (I get much better textures from rendered 3d gem models - they way outclass photosourcing), and I like its performance for the work I've done with it. It's quick to use and for SL - does what I need.

In another thread I thought Mudbox had an advantage with its symmetry/mirror brushes. Then, I noticed I could do the same effect with the Amorphium's normal brush and symmetry. Amorphium defaults to the regular brush which pushes from the camera while Mudbox defaults to the normal brush.

I'd imagine Zbrush defaults to the normal brush, also.

I'll have to see what kinds of modelling tools Zbrush has.

How they both react to pen-sensitivity is probably key, as that is something other 3D renderers don't offer. I have a tablet PC for that extra mile.

I think I know the new thing I will be using ZB3 for -

http://www.zbrush.info/wiki/index.php/MatCap

heh, all I have to do is traditionally render out the object with the lighting I like, or sample from a photo - then matcap it in Zbrush. Bake... and have more control over the contradictory lighting problem. This is nice stuff

off to sleep and play some more with this one.

seriously - for the all in one 3d app... I can't be more pleased with ZB3. Now all it needs is its own exporter to a sculpt map.

Sorry to hear you're having such trouble using Maya, Mordred. I hope you won't get discouraged.

If it's any inspiration, let me share some personal stories. When I first picked up Maya a few years ago, I had never even seen a 3D program before, but by the end of my first day with it, I was able to make this:



That's been my logo for my freelance modeling & graphic design business ever since. Not exactly a wonderful model, but it has sentimental value, and clients always seem to get a laugh out of it, which is good.

Within a week, I was doing fairly realsitic stuff. This was my first realistic model:



I'm saying this not to toot my own horn in any way, but to illustrate how easily learnable Maya really can be. All I did was watch the training videos to see how the basic interface works, I followed a couple of introductory tutorials, and then I just did what came naturally. Again, that was with no prior 3D experience whatsoever.

Now one might say "ok, that was a few years ago, and the program has gotten more complex since then", but really, it hasn't. Sure, it's got more features now than it had then, but the basics are exactly the same. The procedure for rezzing a NURBS sphere, and moving the vertices around hasn't changed a bit, and that's all you need to do to make sculpties.

Actaully, I'll amend that statement. You need to know four things to make sculpties in Maya: how to navigate the basic interface, how to run the sculpt-map exporter script, how to rez a NURBS sphere with 16x16 isoparms, and how to move vertices around. That's it.

And by the way, if you want to know just how far you can take that process of starting with spheres and moving vertices, that wrist-watch in the above picture was made exactly that way. I could bring that watch into SL as a series of sculpties if I wanted to. And as long as we're strolling down memory lane here, here's an example of another model I made using precisely that same technique when I was first learning Maya. This was after about 4 weeks experience:



The full skeleton took about a week and a half to make. Each bone is a modified sphere. With the exception of the skull and the pelvis, which both have too may isoparms, this skeleton could be brought into SL. Come to think of it, maybe I'll do that one of these days when I find some time. I could section the skull and pelvis into a few separate pieces to keep the isoparm count where it needs to be. It would make a pretty fun avatar.

Again, I'm sorry to hear you've been having such a hard time. I'd be willing to bet there's probably something fundamental and simple that you missed in the beginning, and that's what's been holding you back. It really is an easy program to learn, at least as far as what's needed for modeling sculpties goes. Maybe we should start another thread in which we can walk through the process of making a basic shape. Probably a lot of people would find that helpful.

All this having been said, I don't mean to imply that Maya is not an extremely complex piece of software, or that it's unusual for people to get overwhelmed in the beginning by the sheer amount of functions that are available. I'd encourage you not to let Maya's size and scope affect your thinking though. Keep in mind that no one, absolutely no one, has a good handle on everything Maya can do. That's why professional quality projects are generally done through teamwork. Read the credits of a movie made with Maya some time. You'll see hundreds of specialized jobs, all within Maya. Maya's really a platform, not just an application.

As you and I have both said already, Maya is certainly overkill if all you ever want to do with it is make a few sculpties, and if you're not concerned about the kind of texture baking that Xenius was talking about. However, since the original question was what's the best, not what's the most reasonably featured, I stand by my recommendation. In my opinion, Maya is the best.

EIAS is being offered for a very low price. They can do this because they've been around for a long time. They used to be known as Play , Inc. Before modern workstations and before they were called EI, they had produced the Trinity servers to render hollywood movies. Now EI is working with Autodesk (Maya), both companies are going to benefit from each other.

If money is really no object, lots of money left over to get plug-ins from 3rd parties.

From EI's website, a complete rendering studio:

EIAS Competitive Upgrade

EI Technology Group has extended the Electric Image Animation System Competitive upgrade until the end of May! We have also added some additional applications that may be upgraded from including Adobe After Effects and trueSpace. From now until the end of May you can order the EIAS full version as a competitive upgrade for only $399. This is the lowest price ever offered for the full version of EIAS. For additional information please visit Competitive Upgrade Offer.

Oh ya, so I don't get minunderstood and have people thinking I'm just promoting one product...

The future of what can be done inside of SL is bound the change. You've seen the changes already. As features get added, more possibilities happen. Does that mean only certain external tools are best for the job? I doubt it. It appears more at that point of the external tools have become a part of the past.

Just look on the dev lists and see the talk about plug-ins for SL.

I've watched a lot of people over the years in 3d - and to me - the test of a person's skill is if they can make very difficult object IRL render. This is why I chose the gemstone. Not only does the renderer have to be competent - the model itself has to be *exact*

I watched people struggle with programs like Lightwave and Maya - still not getting the effects I did with a cheap app. It's not because the apps can't do it - I could probably do a lot more with my models in something like Maya... if I had the time and money.

what I am saying, is most don't have one or the other, and therefore aren't getting those results quickly, even when they download the warez app they're not getting them!

I recommend before buying a 3d app - to download their demos and *see what works for you* You may discover that Modo may be better, Zbrush, or Lightwave, and these are all professional level apps that can do the job well. Actually - I'd happily stack Modo's modelling tools up against Maya any day. And it costs a LOT less.

Or you may be like me who just refuses to fill the coffers of Autodesk or promote its software when I can help it in situations like this - because all a thread like this does is promote the warez of apps that are unreachable by the average person doing game mods, and takes away money from products that really could be developed more and cost far less, and do most of what Maya does anyway, if not everything you need to do mods in SL - and yes, you can capture global illumination in your textures by rendering them out and using the good old photosampling method. It takes more time, but its doable, and easily reachable, and easier for people to learn.

Regarding ambient occlusion baking, I'll be adding that to the wish list for Carrara 6. But I can fake it in Zbrush anyway, from matcaping my materials off an ambient occlusion render in Carrara and using the baked texture to capture the other relevant parts of the shader in Carrara , then entering the projection mapper with materials checked. I ran some tests last night, and it works like a champ. Takes a little more time, but not much more so. And for me, that's plenty good enough.

It's true. Maya is more like a jack of all trades for people in the industry who use it because its easy to integrate into their pipeline. It only does so so when it comes to modeling and has lots of incomprehensible extras which serve to confuse a learner. It becomes quite hopeless as a modeler when it comes to modeling precise objects like cars, machines and even buildings, and isn't even that efficient modeling organics as compared to Modo.

At the moment, SL has turned it into a very expensive mesh export tool. Its like a three thousand dollar toilet plunger.

The one built into windows itself isn't too bad either, it pops up when I press ctrl-W

There's a modeling tool built-into Windows? darnit, my Windows machine broke a week ago so I can't check it out myself.

To the OP, "best" is such a relative term. And cost is not the only variable here, so it's not enough to simply say cost is no object. For example, if I had to pick only one software with which to do all the various 3D art tasks that I ever have, then yeah I'd pick Maya. I do use Maya a lot, but the simple fact is that I don't use it for everything because I don't have to. Right off the bat, I don't use it for SL animating. Although I use it for all animation intended for high-res renders, I don't use Maya for several more specific animation tasks, including SL. Why? Because the advantages of the animation tools within Maya are outweighed by the difficulty of getting those animations to SL.

Similar tradeoffs apply to virtually everything, including sculpties. You have to evaluate the pros and cons of each possible tool, compare them against your own priorities/needs, and then decide on the best compromise.

Just to continue Johan's theme, the best app can also vary depending on what sort of sculptie you want to do. Rokuro was designed for one particular style, where a 2D shape is rotated, so it is the perfect tool for vases, wine glasses, columns and things like that.

If I was doing a 3D picture, then the gimp (or photoshop) with a gradient on Red and Blue and the picture painted as a heightmap in Green may be the best approach, though perhaps a Z buffer render from a 3D app to create the heightmap is a close alternative.

Even in a particular application there can be a number of different ways to create a sculptie.

In Blender for example I can start with a nurbs sphere if I'm doing something like a teddy bear, using the cage weights and moving the points to do the modelling.

I could start with a mesh cylinder if I'm doing a vehicle wheel, making extensive use of loop select and scaling.

I start with a plane if I'm doing something like a motorbike seat. Here the main modelling would be done by moving the vertices into place, using the X Mirror to do both sides at once and taking care to put the edges of the plane underneath the seat where they don't show.

Find the one that seems most intuitive to you, ignore the cost if it's it not a factor. Don't discount the free stuff as in some cases it might well be just what you are looking for.