The Sculpture Creating Tutorial - batting a simple sculpture in 15 steps

[peterycristi]

The Sculpture Creating Tutorial

Hi folks,

after some requests i decided to try to write a short sculpture creating tutorial. Sculpturing often seams to be one of the hardest parts of batting a building. But at all it's not that hard a lot of you might think. Here i'll try to explain how to create a simple sculpture in just 15 steps. I just hope with a satisfying result. Our testing object should be this logia from munich i did some time ago for a CJ.

As you can see, we need two sculptures on the left and the right. The material should be bronce. But lets figure out, how to create them.

Let's start with a simple sphere which we scale a little. The radius in our example is 0,955 but that should not be so important. Just select a size in which it is confortable for you to work with the basic bodies. Go on scaling down the y-axis by clicking with the right mouse on the scale icon above. This is our torax.

Now just clone the sphere to go on modelling our sculpture. Next we'll do the head.

Just scale the sphere down to 100% on all axis and now change the z-axis to get the shape of a head. Next you should scale down the "head" a little.

Now we'll change the x-angel of the head, so that it fits better with our torax. In our example we choose the value -15,5, this is always a good value.

So this were two of the essential steps. Now we go on modelling our sculture by repeating this three steps. Just change the angels and the scale of your spheres to simulate all the parts of the body. For the legs and the arm should always be the scale on the z-axis higher.

For the lower parts of legs and arms the z-scale should be almost three times the x and y-scale to get a good reasult later. Just go on cloning the spheres and put your sculpture together until you got all parts you need.

At next, well do the shapy dress of the sculture. Let's create a cylinder first. Now we choose edit mesh in the modyfier menu and the symbol for the polygon connections.

Now go on moving every single point of our cylinder. Just think, that you don't need to work so exactelly, it's just to create the impression of a organic body. But it's not so important to really create a perfect copy of the real thing.

After creating the dress of our sculpture just change the angels as you like and copy the modified cylinder as often, as you need it to create more variety, in our case two cylinders should be enough.

At next, just select all the bodies of our sculpture and group them. Thats just more simple for the future steps.

The next important part is the texturing. The combination of the simple sculpture modell and the right texture is the secret of creating scultures in my opinion. For our sculpture we choose a texture from a picture of the logia. By clicking on apply all the bodies of our sculture are pasted by the texture, but that still doesn't look so well.

Thats why we put a UVW-map on our modell.

As you see, the taxture now covers all the sculture. Now we just modify the hole thing a little by selecting cylinder for the UVW-map and change the values of the cylinder so, that it covers the complete modell.

And here we are at the last step. Just move the sculpture on it's position and scale it down until it fits good in it's place.

As you see we got a nice result in our render. I hope, this was usefull for you and it blows a little bit away the fear of creating sculptures. Just try it your own and you'll figure out that it's not so hard at all.

saludos

Peter

[antn]

Nice tutorial, I'm sure many people is helped by this. A little tip for all, Sculptris is a program you can get for free which can be very helpful in making detailed organic shapes, such as statues. It only exports in .obj format but luckily there's a plugin (scroll down to OBJ importer v1.1, and download) for gmax that lets you import files of that format.

[peter007]

Wow I never thought how easy that is.
I surely got to remember that one.

-Ernst

[Buzzit]

this is really something impressive  !
thanks for sharing!

[jmyers2043]

Way to go Peter! The spheres and cylinders have me convinced. Thank you for sharing.

- Jim

[Sciurus]

Thank you for this tutorial, it will be very usefull!!

Guillaume

[supremec]

Very, very usefull!!