Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Skill Builder: Get Started With Digital Sculpting For 3D Printing”.
Welcome back to the channel today we’re going to be exploring digital sculpting for makers. This is going to be extremely basic, beginner stuff, i’m going to explain to you the kind of software you would use to create this and print it, and what kind of printer you’d want to use for the best results. Thanks to our sponsor for this video flashforge we’re going to be exploring some very, very cool stuff, i know a lot of people out there get very daunted by the thought of trying digital sculpting. They see files like this absolutely stunning sculpt here, link to this one down below, so you can download it yourself. This is not mine and they get really discouraged. Thinking i’ll, never be that good. But the fact is, i personally am not trained uh, i’m i’m not even a particularly good artist and i’ve been able to sculpt some fun stuff like this and this for halloween last year, and i’m going to share some tips with you to help you get started And once you give it a try, you may find it’s not quite as insanely difficult as you thought.
So, let’s start with the basics: there are different software packages out there that you can use to digitally sculpt a lot of the time when you picture 3d modeling you’re, imagining like cad drawing but digital sculpting is different. It’S like working with digital clay. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but with some experimentation you may find that it is a little bit more intuitive than you think.
So, let’s start with software, there is free software. You can start playing with right now to you know, get dip! Your toes in the water and see what you think and kind of explore a bit for the pc free software you can use, are sculpt and zbrush core mini. It used to be called sculptris now, it’s zbrushcore mini and both of those packages totally free, actually sculpt gl, runs in a browser, so you may be able to run it on. You know even a raspberry pi or a tablet, or possibly even your phone as for paid software. There is, of course, on the computer zbrush core, as well as zbrush’s full package, that is the industry leader. Probably it’s the one that gets used the most referred to the most and it has the most tools then, after that there is mudbox made by well.
I guess autodesk owns that as well as curvy 3d, which i’ve not used, but i see that it’s out there now there are other packages on the computer that have sculpting inside them. For example, blender has some sculpting sculpting abilities and it’s free by the way. But that’s kind of one piece of this huge package and i’m trying to keep this kind of limited just to sculpting software. I personally really enjoy using an ipad for my digital sculpting so that i can draw directly on the screen and for ipads. Specifically, there are two apps that stand out: they’re, not free, but they are cheap and that is forger and nomad sculpt, and today i’m going to be showing you some basics in nomad sculpt that kind of apply to digital sculpting as a whole.
Okay, here are some basics. This is nomad sculpt on the ipad. It’S the package that i enjoy the most and i’m just going to show you some stuff that kind of applies across the board to most of these digital sculpting packages when you load it up, you’re going to have something here. This is usually referred to as a primitive.
It will be a cube or a sphere or something like that and then, as you draw on it, you can see it changes shape there. It’S like working with clay, the most basic things you’re going to find in most packages are that they’ll have some type of symmetry enabled which allows you to do things. It mirrors what you do on both sides and that’s really great for, like you know, doing faces, and things like that.
You have on one on the sides you’re going to have things like your different tools available and then the strength and size of those tools. You’Re going to see that across all packages, usually there are different types of things that give you like different shapes or effects on the surface, and then there will be the ability to change the material itself. So, let’s undo a bit here, the first thing i usually recommend people do is just fire up any of these packages and try making a face.
It sounds complicated but if you just add in some kind of eyebrows here and a nose in the middle a little bit of a mouth here on the side and then i’m going to switch to subtracting instead of adding and i’m going to kind of push in These sides here rotate it a little bit pushing those sides there a little bit more, maybe push in under here and then push in some eye sockets. This isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but you get the point it’s a face. I did it yay. So after you’ve played around a bit you’ve, you know tried a few digital sculpting sessions and you’ve got your feet wet. I highly recommend you going and finding more tutorials and classes personally, i’ve really been enjoying the series of videos by southern graphics, i’ll put a link to that in the description below okay, let’s jump into some actual hands-on practice, i’m going to show you the extreme basic Process that you’re going to repeat over and over and over, and even the pros kind of repeat this same process when it comes to digital sculpting.
First, you would really be best off with reference material. I did a very quick drawing of this ridiculous frog, and that is what i’m working towards you start with a primitive in this case a ball, and you move things around in big broad shapes to get roughly the shape you want. Then you start going over and adding very rough shapes and details. The idea here is that you’re going to work in broad, strokes and then refine things down and with these digital sculpting programs, every step of the way you’re pretty much going to be adding shapes and then going back over it with a smoothing brush to clean it.
All up a little bit and then adding shapes and then cleaning it up, then adding shapes and then cleaning it up. Slowly, working your way down towards more small and small shapes. It takes a lot of practice.
So don’t worry if, for the for a long time, your stuff just looks like weird blobby messes. If you’re like me, a weird blobby mess, is you know what you’re going for, and here you can see the final result after you’re done with your sculpting. It’S time to print so when it comes to digital sculpting, what you see a lot of people using are resin printers like this one.
This one is from our sponsor flashforge, and this is the photo 8.9 s. It’S got a 192 by 120 millimeter by 200 millimeter build volume and can get incredible precision on your surface. Now, i’m going to show you a comparison of something that was printed on a typical filament based printer and something that was printed on a resin printer.
The reason you would use a resin based printer is just because they can get such tiny little details in such beautiful surface finish here. Just compare these two now this printer specifically is quite nice. They use linear rails for the the vertical axis, so it is sturdy, as can be. It’S got this big touch screen here on the front that gives you previews of the file you’re about to print.
So you know for sure which one it is and you can even connect to it wirelessly or directly over the network, so that you don’t have to lug around a usb stick. Every time you want to go print. Thank you for watching. I hope you learned something and i would love to see your digital sculpts. You know uh, maybe leave a comment below hit us on twitter or instagram and share those digital sculpts with us. Also, a big thank you to flashforge for sponsoring this video i’ve had so much fun with this photo 8.9 s and the results have just been absolutely stunning off of this thing, you .