Sculptember 2019

I’ve been challenging myself with new projects lately, attempting to stretch my creative horizons. For September, I decided to participate in Sculptember 2019. I would complete a new speed sculpt each day of the month based on a specific list of prompts.

That’s thirty sculpts in thirty days.

But that didn’t seem challenging enough, so I decided to do it with a beta¹ version of Blender. I’m familiar with ZBrush², but I’d been hearing great things about the new sculpt tools in Blender 2.81 and wanted to give them a shot.

How did I do? Quite well, I think. Each day after work I’d download the latest build of Blender and start crackin’ on the prompt du jour.

Not only did I complete the challenge, I feel like I finished stronger than I started. Blender got more stable each day, and my comfort in using the new voxel remeshing, and other new sculpt tools, were improving just as rapidly.

So here they are, all thirty sculpts from the month of September. I have my favorites, what are yours?

BTS³

If you’re curious, here’s my typical process when creating a sculpt.

1. Blockout – Just get the basic shapes in place: spheres, cubes, etc.
2. Shape Up – Do a first pass of each object to get them close to the right shape.
3. Refinement – Work on all of the objects, focusing on proportions and likeness. This step is usually the longest. I’ll wind up merging a lot of the objects at this point.
4. Color – For these sculpts I used vertex painting and a custom shader that let me use the vertex paint data for specifying Roughness and SSS.
5. Posing – Up to this point I like to keep the model as symmetrical as possible. I can keep the X Mirror option enabled to speed up the process. But I’ll break that here, you don’t want to have a “t-pose” as your final (Although I did a couple of times – Ran out of time on those).
6. Rendering – I used Eevee, so this was super fast.
7. Publishing – Post it on social media with the right hashtags and call it done.

That’s it. I had a blast doing these pieces. I’ve been very impressed with Blender’s new sculpting tools and (probably by 2.82) could see forsaking ZBrush and using Blender as my go-to sculpting tool.

Oh, it looks like there’s a “SculptJanuary” challenge too – This one was so fun, I think I’ll have to do it. By then I guess I can test Blender 2.82.