Sculpting is a creative process of moulding suitable materials into a sculpture. Traditional Sculptors prefer using clay to sculpt as it is really easy to add, subtract and shape it during sculpting process. They create wire armatures to give the sculpture a balance and stability then start putting clay to add volume.
Digital Sculpting uses modern technologies and programs to create sculptures. It has many advantages over traditional sculpting like it doesn’t need any armature and we can create sculptures from normal primitives (sphere, box etc.)
Unlike traditional sculpting, digital sculpting programs offer layer management to organize the sculpting information, therefore we can sculpt different textures and patterns over a single surface without erasing the previous one, and same goes with the texture painting.
We have lots of software packages that offer high-end digital sculpting and painting tools which help artists to achieve amazingly real and high quality sculptures. Here are some best software programs that you can use to create your own digital sculptures.
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Pixologic Zbrush
Pixologic Zbrush is a great digital sculpting and painting software widely used in game and film industry by many professionals. It has numerous amounts of features like Dynamesh to generate base mesh, ZRemesher for retopologizing, FiberMesh to create hair-fur stuff and much more which makes Zbrush a complete Professional tool for sculptors.
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Autodesk Mudbox
Autodesk Mudbox is another industry standard program with awesome sculpting and texture painting abilities. It comes with numerous amount of useful tools such as Layers for better organization of sculpt and paint data, Symmetrical retopologizing, advanced retopology toolset and UV-less painting.
This great software complements the industry’s top most 3d packages for better interoperability and pipeline integration.
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Sculptris
Sculptris is a free sculpting and painting tool created by Pixologic. It has very simple and clutter free user interface with two navigation methods (Sculptris original navigation controls and Zbrush navigation controls) that can be toggled any time.
It has wide variety of tools like Automatic UV creation, Projection Painting, Dynamic Tessellation control which make sculpting process much easier. If you are new to sculpting then Sculptris is a great tool to start with.
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3d Coat
3d coat is next in the list with lots of awesome features including Auto-retopology Voxel Sculpting, UV mapping support, Ptex support.
It supports 3dConnexion which helps user to easily navigate the model in 3d space and available in eight languages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms.
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Geomagic Freeform
Geomagic Freeform is a great sculpting program with the ability to perform wire cuts, loft and sweep operations. It has great tools for voxel, polygonal, SubD and NURBS modeling and can also measure mass properties like surface area, volume, piece density with piece-to-piece fit, intersections and thickness analysis.
You can paint textures over your model and even render it with the Mental ray rendering engine inside this great tool.
These software packages are ideal for sculpting students, artists, modelers and game designers. You can choose any of the given software that better suits your needs. Thanks.