A free (and awesome) 3D tool : Sculptris

[Midgardsormr]

We have had two threads about this app before. It was pretty cool when I tried it out last time. I cant really understand why its being bought by zbrush other than to eventually deprecate it out of the way... any other ideas about that ?

Well, if they were simply nervous about a free application competing with ZBrush, they'd have simply shut it down after the purchase, but given that the people who use ZBrush are more than willing to pay for technical support, that seems unlikely to me.

Instead, they're developing it. So my guess is that it has some technology in it that they wanted to obtain. It looks like they might be planning to use it as a test bed for features that they're planning to eventually add to ZBrush. I just discovered Autodesk's Mudbox, which is essentially the same thing, a few months ago. If I'd known about that at the beginning of art school, I might have been more than an indifferent modeler. I'm planning to see what I can do with it over the next few months.

[Redrobes]

Zbrush is supposed to be the daddy of these type apps and this sculptris was emulating that but had this neat automatic face subdivision which I thought was cool at the time. That might have the been the reason. I found sculptris easy to use but its like a set of pens or paint, its only as good as the sculptor but then at least your not fighting with the software. Blender has this built in too and thats pretty easy to use as well. Spoilt for choice now.

[Ajhacket]

The software developer for Sculptris who came up with alot of the base sculpting algorithims went to work for pixologic. Pixologic as a service to the open source community and probably with some prodding from the developer released it to the opensource community. Its actually the route I took to buying Zbrush 4 which is for good reasons a industry leading 3D sculpting package.

[loogie]

yeah, it's fairly common for a large industry leading company to look into OpenSource "side projects", it gets people interested in the genre, in many cases gets you "used to" a certian way of doing things, and gets the brand loyalty in there even when your not paying for anything... when/if you end up paying for a program, you're more likely to buy from them, cause your familiar with how they do things... it looks quite interesting.. i'm going to try it out when i get home

[Hai-Etlik]

The software developer for Sculptris who came up with alot of the base sculpting algorithims went to work for pixologic. Pixologic as a service to the open source community and probably with some prodding from the developer released it to the opensource community. Its actually the route I took to buying Zbrush 4 which is for good reasons a industry leading 3D sculpting package.

Are you sure about that? I don't see any indication of source code or an open license. Wikipedia lists it as being proprietary.

[Slylok]

Are you sure about that? I don't see any indication of source code or an open license. Wikipedia lists it as being proprietary.

Its freeware not open source software. I prefer blender myself