Sculpting 3D sculpting learning curve?

I've found Sculptris to be really intuitive. It's free, but limited. You won't be able to hollow out your sculpts with this, make eyewells, etc. However, once you are happy with the sculpt itself, you can load it into another program of your choice to do the rest of the prep work. I use Windows 3D Builder for that, but Blender should work too. I just couldn't personally get the hang of it.

 

Hi! I think Blender is exactly what you need here. I find it quite intuitive (especially the sculpting part), but you'll need to watch a couple of tutorials to rly get the hang of it, luckily there's a lot of them on YT. I think you should be fine after watching, like, two to sculpt your character and another two to hollow it out for print and stuff. (maybe exaggerating here a lil) From there it's just the matter of your artistic skills. And, yea, you'll need a graphics tablet to be totally comfortable.

I've never touched Maya, but I believe it's mainly a poly modeling program, which means you construct the objects using polygons (imagine laying tile), which is, in my opinion, not as suitable for dollmaking and generally making organic forms. 3D sculpting, on the other hand, focuses more on the "sculpting" part (duh), which is far more straightforward because it doesn't focus on polygons, but rather the actual forms and, therefore, is more straightforward. So, if you're bad at Maya doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be bad at 3D sculpting.

About some sculpting programs from my personal experience:

• I discovered 3D by messing with Sculptris, it's like a rly bare-bones version of Zbrush, which is cool for doing some fun concept sketches, but I don't think you'll really want this for anything other than that. You could, ofc, export the model and then refine it somewhere else, but I think that's just an extra hassle.
• Then you have Zbrush. I didn't really like it at first and I don't like it now, even though it's really popular for dollmaking. In my opinion, the interface is far less intuitive than in Blender and the features (a.k.a. the fun factor) are limited to, well, sculpting and some basic texturing. (Which may or may not be a good thing) Also Zbrush is quite expensive.
  
• And, finally, Blender (a.k.a. my program of choice). Unlike Zbrush, It's an all-around 3D soft for sculpting, texturing, rendering, editing etc. (I like to texture and render my models for fun, so yea) It has a variety of layouts, each one is optimized for the particular task and also customizeable. Sculpting interface is quite nice and easy to understand (I like it better than others), has a bunch of brushes to choose from and various default materials to view your model in, much like Zbrush, but better because of customizeability. Comes at a whopping price of $0.00!

Blender has never crushed on me, but you may experience some lagging (or freezing) if you exceed some particular polygon count (I have a weak processor, for me it gets uncomfortable around 1M), so look out for that. (Also my PC can't handle Blender's polypaint (texturing), so I use Zbrush if I want to throw on some textures on my char, idk why, but it works fine there)

I've tried traditional sculpting for my doll too, but I'm never totally satisfied with the materials and I think 3D has really solved my problem there. I think you should at least give it a try and if you don't like it, well, at least you'll know that for sure.

 

I think I'm able to get pretty good detail with Sculptris. All my actual sculpting so far has happened in there. There are settings for both brush size and brush intensity, and on some brushes you can choose whether to just deform existing polygons or create new ones. I would think Blender has similar settings, but I don't know. Have you been able to find any tutorials?

 

You're not cursed, you're a beginner.

Addressing your blender difficulties: your polygon count may be too low for the small details to show up. Try using dyntopo if this is the case. (Checkbox at the top right corner in the sculpt mode viewport, above the axis gizmo) For relative detail dyntopo mode, the lower you set the value - the more resolution you get, plus it gets higher and higher as you zoom in. For constant detail mode, higher value means more detail, stays the same no matter how close you zoom in.

Rly all you have to know about brush settings in blender is that the radius controls the size of your brush and strength controls, well, the strength. No need to touch any other brush settings.

Didn't really get what you mean by "skippy", so idk what's about that.

I believe what you having in Sculptris might be a resolution issue too.

 

If I'm picture the Sculptris bubbles and spikes correctly, I think it's one of four things: 1) you've got the invert box checked when you don't need it, 2) the brush strength is too high, 3) you need to raise (or possibly lower) the detail slider, or 4) you need to use the reduce brush on those areas a bit (just tap it over the bubbly part and see if it starts to smooth out).

 

Please forgive my uneducated questions here, but this is totally new to me. I have sculpted in polymer clay, and was interested in learning about this. I have downloaded Blender and have looked at a couple of the excellent tutorials. But, this seems really different from what I was expecting. Is this something you'd sculpt digitally on a tablet and then print out on a 3D printer? I don't see any other way to get it from computer to reality. TIA

 

This might not apply to blender, but it is a common stumbling block. Sometimes tools don't behave correctly (jumping too far, or not moving at all) if the units aren't set up correctly. I have only used 3DS Max and zbrush... But it could be worth looking into. (apologies if this is not helpful at all)

Finally, I want to offer encouragement! 3D is brutal to learn, but keep pushing and you'll get to the stage where something starts to look finished. And then it has life! And that's the most amazing feeling!

 

So it was already said by @Zardi but try using the reduce brush for sculptris and your bubble problem! The way Scupltris works is that it dynamically adds more geometry (all the points/polys) as you sculpt, and the idea is generally so that you only have more polys in areas that actually need them (detailed areas). The “problem” (until you know how to deal with it) is that Sculptris adds these expontentially as you continue to work on an area. It does not stop you if you are going so far that you collapse your own model inwards, and that is exactly what happens.

Try turning on the visibility of the wireframe, and be sure to use the reduce brush when it begins to become unreasonably crowded (you will know this because the wireframe is white, so if your model has areas that are white, reduce them). For areas that havr already bubbled, you CAN fix them but it might be worth scrapping and starting over. If you want to salvage it though, be patient and zoom in, using the reduce brush to get in everwhere to remove all that inverted geometry. This part will take some time.

Lastly, about brushes: the size can have an effect on the strength and the reduce brush is a great example of this. If you have bubbled inverted geometry for example, there will be spikes like you have noticed, and those are vertices jutting out into space. If you use a large size reduce brush on these, it will often appear to do nothing. This is because the broad size is meant to work on a broad area, and you are trying to use it on a narrow one. You need to change your brush size to a smaller size more comparable to the points of the spikes and then use it.

Sculptris is actually working fully as intended for you, but don’t worry that you didn’t know what was happening, I exploded my first sculpts from the inside out too! Take it as Sculptris’s little reminder that you need to still pay attention to the technical side (your vertex count and concentration) even though it will happily let you break any limits in order to let you do what you wanna do.

(As for Blender... the sculpting tools just aren’t there yet, it isn’t just you. Blender is awesome, but unless you want to work 6x harder for the same result, I find it is best to stick to hard-surface modelling or actual rendering for Blender. Not to insult Blender of course, I am a big fan! It is still my main program for anything other than sculpting, and I have hopes that the sculpting tools will eventually work as well as Sculptris and zBrush. You can 100% make your doll in Sculptris and Blender, and that is how I made my first doll parts!)

 

Yes. You'd create your sculpt in the program, then either upload it to a place like Shapeways to get it printed professionally, or load it into the slicer software for a home 3D printer to get an actual, real-life model.

 

You can actually use images in Sculptris to match your sculpts with as well. Doing so requires a bit of image editing and may be somewhat unsophisticated compared to Blender (not sure), but it can be done.