After getting through the basics of Google Sketchup in part 1 and part 2 of the previous articles and learning how to build great architectural scenes starting with some ordinary geometrical shapes, you feel ready for the next step, right?
3D modeling, as you remember, is quite different from 3D building. If building in 3D means to use some 2D basic shapes like rectangles, circles and polygons and push them, drag them, offset them to get to the final result, 3D modeling is all about sculpting. Using several simple tools, you will be able to make great 3D characters like the following one, without being a computer guru.
You would believe that such a complex model needs an expensive, hard to learn software to do it, right?
WRONG! The model is entirely made using Sculptris and its user-friendly features and commands. Got your attention? Read on!
The developers from Pixologic created this wonderful piece of software with a single goal in mind: simplicity. It’s almost unbelievable that such a great, simple and powerful application can be free. But it is.
You may download it from here and install it. Here is the main window that will show up when you open the program.
You have no menus within the application, just several buttons and their adjustments, the main sphere and a quick help.
Think about the sphere as a piece of clay. Using the buttons, you will model the raw clay, giving it a shape.
Almost every button has a quick, fine-tune panel. Here you may adjust the size of your tool, its strength and detail. A very helpful feature is that you don’t need to insert numeric values for that, just to drag some slider bars and visualize the immediate result.
Most of the time you will use the first set of buttons. Each one of them also has a keyboard shortcut.
We’ll take a closer look at the many features of Sculptris in part 2 of this article.
~ Adrian