Unlimited Clay, Sculptris Holy Grail soon in Blender!

Hi Everyone

I just couldn´t resist the temptation 😉

The first time I saw voxel sculpting in 3D Coat I said to myself: I hope one day we have in Blender Voxel Sculpting! But at that time I hadn´t the necessary skills to start the project, so I pushed it to my todo list. What captivates me more about Voxel sculpting, is the “Unlimited Clay” freedom, you don´t have to worry anymore for polygon stretching and instead you can focus on the art itself.

Of course, for animation and game projects those freeforms have to be retopologized (not an issue if Rohith‘s project is successful) and this is always important to keep good topology from the beginning … but you get my point.

Then , suddenly, Sculptris came to the scene, a very small and well designed application with an incredible feature: Sculpting tessellation or subdivision on the fly! it was not voxel based at all
but provides similar freedom: unlimited clay to sculpt!

another topic if Voxel Sculpting or Sculpting Dynamic Subdivision are equivalents from the user perspective (I think they are 😉 ) but something start to blink under my radar: -We must have it in Blender! And this seems definitely easier to implement than Voxel Sculpting because the foundations are already set in the excellent and ever improving Sculpt module.

After the Blendiac visited to Cuba, I have promised this to them and I have talked with Dr Petters (Sculptris creator) about a future possibility of implementing that feature in Blender. He’s gently answered telling me that it was not his current interest and he at that time didn´t know what will be the future of Sculptris: Opensource?, sell to a company?, etc

I’ve told him that sometime in the future, even without his assistance or proper documentation, I will try to replicate that feature: the algorithm proves to be not difficult at all. So I put this second project on hold, until two days ago, where a Blenderartist thread wake up my sleeped interest in Sculpting Dynamic Subdivision: and after two sleepless nights I have a working prototype!!!!!

I have no skills at all in Mesh/Sculpt code, so my current work is … well, a tinkering with Blender code. If it attracts the interest of an experienced dev in Mesh/Sculpting I could take this further 😉 . There´s a lot of room for improvements and currently it’s highly experimental so not comparable currently with the Sculptris implementation and should be redesigned, but it could easily be a kick ass feature in the Blender Sculpting toolbox! It basically allows the artist to add new details and parts to the sculpted mesh like branches, carved perfect holes, etc, on the fly, without a prior planification. Here I show you a video and as always, I hope you will love this new surprise 🙂

Hope you love it

Cheers Farsthary