This Forum is dying ... Congrats great Pixologic !

[SeanJM]

SeanJM >>
Thanks for the information dear Sean, and I can remember your brilliant UI designs,... so handy and so beautiful.

Thank you, :-)

[MealeaYing]

It is NOT dying, its merely taking a very deep breath before doing its next amazing thing, what that is I have no idea, but thats what its doing.


GRIN!

[michalis]

Normally, deep breath is needed to go down. @Mealea
I hope to find some amazing things down there.


This forum is may dying, congats to all of us. Sculptris is a great but not a stand alone app. The better we have is to use it as it really is.

[gpepper]

Actually, I use more Sculptris than ZBrush...
And I am used to Sculpt with ZB until 2001...

I just hope that Sculptris won't die !

[Knacki]

Last 24h 100 posts in ZBC 10 posts in SMF.
10% of posts for a pretty small free app with just a small part of zb functionality.

Quality of work is rising dramatically.
It has never been very different, even in "good old days".

I see nothing dying.

We should go back to living reality instead of waiting for the funeral.

[asecbrush]

I really hope them Pixo dudes have some interesting updates in mind for Sculptris because with some work done to it it could become a better addition to ZBrush than it currently is.

Everybody has their own preferences but personally I like to start with ZBrush and then GoZ to Sculptris because in my experience there's simply nothing better than dynamic tesselation, not even Dynamesh.

A dream scenario for me would be if they could integrate Sculptris functionality into ZBrush, and then with some additional retopo improvement ZBrush could become master of the 3D sculpting universe , "mooohhh-hhaaahhaaa-hhaaaaahhhh !!!"

But I fear it will stay just a dream ...

[SeanJM]

It had a lot of potential. And it may indeed be dead, lack of news, no communication from DrP. Kind of pissed about it myself, since I love it. Dynamic Tesselation really feels good to work with. I just want a few more tools and I'm golden!

What if we just got a bunch of us together and created something on our own?

It took him 3 months to create it, let's say we pay a very good programmer $35 (USD) for 40 hours a week, for 12 weeks. That's $16,800 -- maybe we can raise that money.

[michalis]

There's another topic to discuss about the future of sculptris.
Here is the topic on the future of Sc forum. Anyway.
It's a little disappointing that for the "holy cow. santa was an alien" only five entries we see. Though the challenge was really funny... So congrats to all SC users here. Pixologic has nothing to do with it.
About sculptris, I don't have any serious reason to work on it after dynamesh implementation.
Yes, I also tried the dynamesh to Sc workflow. It should be interesting but it doesn't work always.
A more interesting workflow though, could be, sculptris to 3dcoat. As dynamic tessellation there (surface mode/LiveClay) can go up to lot of millions of tris. But it lacks the good sculptris tools. Great for fine details though. And straight for retopo/baking there. A very powerful workflow. You may always jump to zbrush for fine details after all.
All these could dramatically change if Pixologic could take this retopo/UV thing seriously.
Staying on freeware apps, the best choice is the Sculptris/blender combo. Not bad at all, BTW, another powerful combo.

[SeanJM]

There's another topic to discuss about the future of sculptris.
Here is the topic on the future of Sc forum. Anyway.
It's a little disappointing that for the "holy cow. santa was an alien" only five entries we see. Though the challenge was really funny... So congrats to all SC users here. Pixologic has nothing to do with it.

Some people may just not have been interested.

About sculptris, I don't have any serious reason to work on it after dynamesh implementation.
Yes, I also tried the dynamesh to Sc workflow. It should be interesting but it doesn't work always.
A more interesting workflow though, could be, sculptris to 3dcoat. As dynamic tessellation there (surface mode/LiveClay) can go up to lot of millions of tris. But it lacks the good sculptris tools. Great for fine details though. And straight for retopo/baking there. A very powerful workflow. You may always jump to zbrush for fine details after all.
All these could dramatically change if Pixologic could take this retopo/UV thing seriously.
Staying on freeware apps, the best choice is the Sculptris/blender combo. Not bad at all, BTW, another powerful combo.

Yeah, Retopo/UV's -- :-)

[blueferret]

@ michalis and all others Interested I was under the impression that pixologic owned Sculptris so hiring a programmer would be big nono...
1st you would have to buy rights to Sculptris if they would sell it at all and that would be a spendy proprosition..
I'd be worried about copyright infringement.

I still start in Sculptris to flesh out ideas and then move over to Zbr to finnish. Maybe we need to communicate with the newer Sculptris folk a little more a ( have found myself not answering questions sometimes cause I'm to wrapped up in my own challenges with Zbr and all the other apps I use, and because I guess They are the same questions over and over again.....
( If that makes me a bad person I apologize to all in advance ).

An Idea would be to start a new forum where only free apps are used ( I believe justadeleted guy ) has started some thing
like that, but I don't see a whole lot of traffic there.......Maybe that would be worth considering or maybe a mass migration to Greece and we can all crash at a well known Sculpters Digs......

All in all I'm sort of afraid to make to many waves as Sculptris might vanish and the forum with it.......

@ knacki
On the Xmas challenge ...I enjoyed it and the different ideas brought forth.....Perhaps there needs to be rank sytem of winners ..1st,2nd,3rd
or whatever and maybe a prize of some sort a virtual plaque or a printable certficate with the names of all the contestants....MAAAAYBE that
would spark it up a bit and draw a bigger crowd......

Love all you guys and girls : Deke aka Blue

[Cluly]

I thought this would happen to Sculptris when Pixo picked it up, Sculptris was developing so rapidly it WAS a big threat to zBrush, 1-2 years down the line from DrP's original development speed would have made it a massive contender. I would have bought Sculptris from DrP himself, but it just feels like he's sold out, everyone has a price I guess and It may have been a mistake on his part.

Pixo got what they wanted from this, Sculptris will remain a toy and not a threat. Which is a shame.

Cluly

[michalis]

2012 now.
So, most of you believe that this forum is dying because pixologic doesn't develop sculptris as rapidly as they should.
That people lost interest in sculptris. Though Sc a6 runs under OSX too.
I see lot of views/visits but few replies on many interesting threads. This is what I see. I don't have a clear explanation though.
To start a forum involving freeware apps only isn't a good idea (@ blue). Freeware or commercial apps have to be able to participate in a keychain, a workflow. Have to be compatible and productive.
@Cluly
One thing I don't quite understand about pixologic is why they bought sculptris. They bought all this fine technology but I don't see any implementation in zbrush. In place of this we have a quite different approach, dynamesh. Much better for boolean like operations but not that good for sculpting.
-3dcoat with its powerful voxels is another interesting solution for booleans (great in fact) but too heavy for the hardware. So they also adopted a developer from blender and started dynamic tessellation in a new base. More powerful than sculptris (5 millions or 10 millions of polys... well that's something). 3dcoat lacks the great tools of sculptris but this can change soon.
3dcoat dynamic tessellation /LiveClay is also able to perform some basic boolean operations, much better than mesh mixer.
-Blender: they were ready for their dynamic tessellation implementation but they changed their plans. So blender is ready, in the following days, for this: Have a look. Another dynamesh-like approach, excellent for booleans as well.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Us...RemeshModifier

If I may say, it seems that it's rather difficult for dynamic tessellation to act as a boolean remesher. It may be possible though, 3dcoat LC is a good example. Another issue is that dynamic tessellation isn't too compatible with vertex painting. (the zbrush painting method).

Neither a decent retopology solution in pixologic exists... ,this I can't understand. ZBrush may has difficulties supporting openGL solutions but sculptris is an openGL based app. Yes, ZB may supports millions of poly redrawing but faces serious difficulties when trying to draw a single vertex.

[justadeletedguy]

the Remesh modifier has been Available for about a half a year now. I like this version because it also has the Blender version of Zspheres. It works and builds a nice even mesh, but they're chunky unless you go to very high (200k+) Sub level. When joining several objects, it works best to "boolean" them together first, then remesh. And Yes, This could be a nice way to retopo to low-poly, but blender has a Decimator as well, and the old (2.49-) blender has a Mesh-poly-reduce Script that will keep your UV's ..

If you look through my posts, you'll notice a similar theme, trying to use various Free apps in place of Zbrush because the big "boss" in not in the Budget, and here's the list.

Wings3d with Manifold Lab, Roadkill, 3D Coat, 3 different versions of Blender(the two above plus the latest and greatest), Meshmixer, Paint.NET with all the plugins, and of course Sculptris (I have both alpha 5 and 6).

And once you spend about 6 months building workflows for various functions, Googling and reading to understand the basics of the Wavefront object format (.obj) and such, building alpha libraries, materials and backgrounds, you'll realize Zbrush is "DA Bomb" and the rest is just a waste of time!! Don't get me wrong, it's been very educational, I feel I have a much better understanding of the process than most, and you can get very detailed, animatable quad meshes this way, but you'll work twice as hard for half as much!! You need to get Zbrush! Can't afford it, as a hobbiest I certainly understand. Try installing the Trial to a Virtual Box! Have fun reading about that !!

[Knacki]

This is spot on, justadeletedguy!
Brilliant.
Sculptris still has it's artificial charm in "endless" sculpting.
Love the tools so much.

But zBrush is sculpting beyond imagination.

Sculptris section here is a good starting place for people using sculptris first time.

If you see what those guys produce with no idea about 3D one realizes sculptris a next generation tool.
You just do what YOU want, not what happened while trying to achieve something else.

I am still hoping that real sculptris style sculpting with it's tools will once be integrated in zBrush.
But even than, this section will not be dead. Everything has to have a beginning, hasn't it

Happy new year folks!

[K.R.I.S]

Pixo didn't buy Sculptris to develop it. The company bought out what it saw as a future competitor. However, since Sculptris is so small, Pixo didn't really have to implement anything or continue to work on it. The same thing happened when AutoDesk bought Mudbox. The only difference is that AD didn't have a sculpting app, so the company could continue to develop it and bring it to the forefront of its business.

Pixo has Zbrush. Sculptris was added as a free app to get people excited about sculpting and then to end up purchasing Zbrush after they were ready to get more tools.

If anyone really thinks Pixo has plans to further develop Sculptris, then you are sorely mistaken. Do I have proof? No...but I do use the lack of updates and development for my hypothesis.

Happy Sculpting in 2012!