External projection painting with Sculptris

This is a slightly different kind of texture painting mode from what I showed before. The video is not edited, it's a live stream of the workflow. These features aren't available in the alpha version yet, so consider this a teaser.

I'm currently using two hotkeys - one for exporting the current view to a layered PSD file, and another to import and "paste" the edited image information from that same file. I ended up using almost the same view angle throughout this whole video, but it does project equally well from any direction.

As you can see, the file is set up with blended layers that allow me to paint on a seemingly 3D object with complete lighting, or I can switch off the shading layer to see my raw texture pixels. Visualized bumpmap information is also exported to a hidden layer that can be used for nice masking effects. It's not imported back to the model though, so you can't edit the bumps that way.

This will be a complement to native "direct" texture painting onto the actual object, and should be useful for more advanced detailing or simply to let you paint in an application that you're comfortable with. The main drawback is of course that you can't rotate the object immediately while painting, and complex surfaces might end up with limited coverage (shadows) from the projection.

Check out my site or forum for more information: http://drpetter.se/project_sculpt.html


The excellent music in this video was made by Taron: http://www.taron.de/ (in musagi!)

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• sculptris
• sculpting
• texture
• painting
• projection
• uv
• mapping
• bumpmap
• photoshop
• 3d
• model
• brush
• masking
• programming
• development
• coding
• psd
• layers
• lighting
• blending
• hard light

[runnerblood]

Hi. I just took Sculptris on my new OpenGL notebook. I'm pretty advanced now in modeling, texturing, rigging and rendering (AoI) and for my advanced works I always work with Sculptris. Still, I can't understand how you do that thing in the video... while modeling sculptris generates a .psd texture and I can edit that as I am modeling... ?

[drpetter]

The PSD file is a snapshot of the display, with camera projection information stored. After you've edited the image you can import it back into Sculptris and it will get projected onto the 3D model. You'll be able to try it out soon in a new version.

[JamesMRaymond]

This reminds me of the new Projection painting in blender!

2 very similar techniques at pretty much the same time...

[drpetter]

Yes! Actually I saw a video of that new Blender projection paint just yesterday, on a forum thread that linked to my site (I found it through came-from statistics). I also saw some video on vimeo I think it was, a couple of weeks ago. That was in some other application.

For the record, I did think of this general technique myself in December of last year. It's kind of obvious though, so I'm sure there have been many different implementations over the last 20 years.

[Jallenbah]

Looks awesome.

Will this be able to export .mtl's with .objs and texture files? If so then that's super awesome.

[drpetter]

Yeah, I will of course try to make it export in a useful way. It's a standard uv-mapped texture, so it shouldn't be a problem at all.

[psynex]

I'm miffed. How can you set hotkeys that allow the import/exporting while in Sculpt mode? I'd love to be able to do this with the Chrome material which currently doesn't carry over into Paint mode. Then I can go into Photoshop and add decals to my model.

[combatives]

So amazing, beautiful work! WOW!

[WilmMatsunaga]

凄いです！！このSculptrisなるフリーソフト、Win用­だけど粘土みたいに3DCGモデリング出来る(＊0＊;)☆こう­いうのがずっとず〜っと欲しかったんです！！

[thedarkcloakTDC]

@drpetter Sorry if I'm missing something, since these posts are from quite a while ago... but is this feature implemented now in Alpha 5?

[tassiofranca]

hello you can repeat the tutorial but more explained in the key commands that you used in this video so that students can understand better?

please put subtitles

[samantha12345678909]

How do you rotate the sphere i have this and its fun but i dont know how to rotate th sphere

[Nicro327]

@drpetter How did you get the brush that looks like cracks

[pwp728]

Has this feature been released yet? I'm currently trying out Alpha 5, and I don't believe it is included in the version I have, correct?

And awesome work. Also, will we be able to export our 3D Paint map instead of having to paint on the UV map?

[Enes372]

great little harder to do than to zbrush but it is great program.)

[dementisprimus]

Truly Awesome!! I use Mudbox & Zbrush for work, but today I tried Sculptris and I was blown away by the dynamic mesh tesselation.

WOW!!

I see Pixologic has taken over Sculptris!! I hope you got your due because this is awesome!