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Another September is now in the books. It was a notable month for so, so many reasons. Not the least of which is Sculptember! I participated last year, and it was so much fun I had to do it again.
The big-daddy of digital sculpting apps is ZBrush. I do own a copy of ZBrush but, frankly, it’s so unintuitive that I always forget the arcane keyboard and mouse gesture combinations required to be productive1. So once again, I used Blender instead. And it continues to impress. It’s still a bit laggy on big scenes with a lot of polys (on my MacBook Pro, anyway). But it’s possible that might be fixed soon.
While I can get up to speed much faster in Blender than ZBrush, it still takes a good week, or so, before I feel like I’m creating stuff that’s not horrible2. The primary way I can tell I’m getting back into the groove is my blockout phase goes much faster3. I find the base forms more quickly and can add a few more details before running out of time.
Usually, I gave myself two or three hours to complete a piece. Sometimes I went long. The Scrooge McDuck4 scene took the longest by far. But it was a Saturday, so I let myself have fun and experiment with particle systems for the coins.
Sculpts on Film
This time I recorded a few timelapse videos. You can see them all on YouTube… Where else?
For the lazy/impatient, here’s the entire playlist:
If you’re interested, I actually used Blender to edit these videos too. Blender is the Swiss Army Knife of digital content creation5.
I record my sessions using a bash script (see below) that captures a screenshot of my primary display once per second. From there, I import those files as an image sequence into Blender, add some royalty-free music, a post-reel image zoom animation, and voilà!
Gallery
Listed below are all 30 sculpts from September, un-altered6. Some are originals; the majority are pop-culture references. 80s/90s cartoons, mostly. If you can’t place one, or have any questions, hit me up in the comments or on twitter.
Enjoy!






























Nerd Stuff
Here’s the bash function that captures a screenshot every N
seconds:
# For macOS only, AFAIK
# (unless your OS has a `screencapture` executable that accepts the same params)
function razzi(){
local COUNTER=1
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Must provide delay value (in seconds)"
fi
if [ $# -eq 1 ]; then
echo "Capturing screenshots every ${1} seconds to ~/Projects/Temp/ScreenCaptures"
while :; do
sleep $1;
screencapture -x -tjpg -C ~/Projects/Temp/ScreenCaptures/$(date +%y%m%d%H%M%S).jpg;
echo "Snap! ($COUNTER)";
let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
done
fi
}
And yes, I am that kind of nerd. Even when creating art, I code.
I used to know 'em. But it’s amazing how quickly that kind of stuff exits your brain when you don’t use it. ↩︎
I mean, you know… Art is subjective; you may still think it’s horrible – and that’s fine – I’m just saying, it takes a while to remember how forms work in space. ↩︎
I explain my process and the phases of a 3D sculpt in my last Sculptember post. ↩︎
Day 19: Rich ↩︎
Except, you know, not Swiss. I guess, if anything, it’d be Dutch software, eh? ↩︎
Technically, they are altered, I suppose. I added my watermark to the corner. But that’s all—no touch-ups to the renders after the fact. ↩︎