I want to purchase and learn a CAD program so I can create my own sculpture for printing. I don't know any CAD programs now but I develop software for a living so I learn new programs all the time. What CAD package would be best suited for the following requirements? Type of work: I will be creating curved organic form sculpture. I will never be doing machine type assemblies and sub assemblies. Learning Curve: I know any package will have a steep learning curve but I have been told some packages may require 4 steps to do a task where as a package built on a more modern framework can do it in 1 step. I am willing to learn but I will not be using it every day for work so it can't be to complicated. Cost: Open source would be preferred but I can probably go up a $500 usd or so if there is a compelling reason. I am also a part time student and have been told some vendors offer student discounts. Thanks everyone! Harlan
Hi, Harlan. Sculptris from pixologic is free, easy to use and funny to work with. I've got good results with it: If you have any doubts or issues, please ask me. Regards and good luck! Luis
Thanks Luis! Sculptris looks amazing I am watching some you tube videos of it now and it seems to be just what I was looking for. I will download it and give it it a try. Many thanks Harlan
Nice sculpts Luis! The other answer you'll get is Zbrush, which is also from Pixologic. They offer an educational license for around $450. Zbrush is a lot harder to learn than Sculptris, but you can do LOT more with it.
Thanks, James. I have the luck of being proud of my work. And yes, Zbrush may have many more interesting tools than the simpliest sculptris. But sculptris really fills all your initial artistic needs with only a couple of tools and with a free licence software!
Blender is free and has sculpting tools. www.blender.org http://vimeo.com/13051906 (not my video, btw.) Steve S
I use blender for many tasks. The problem with blender is that has so much tools and for so many creative activities, that is very difficult to learn how to do something simple. But its pro is that It has many tutorials in youtube, and in many languages. I think that if I had tried to learn sculpting with blender, probably never had made one only sculpted model. It's my opinion, and blender really helps me in many other forms. Regards Luis
The problem I hit with Sculptris is that I couldn't find a way to measure things. For example, I want the length of a finger from the knuckle to the finger tip to be 10 millimeters. I didn't see a way to do that in Sculptris. It may just be that I am very new to the software and didn't figure out how. Thanks Harlan
Hi, Harlan. You can't. Sculptris is a modelling software. When you have the model more or less in proportion, you have to go to blender to check the size and plan to resize it before upload. Blender is a good tool to do this. What did I do the first week with sculptris? Adam and Eve: The proportioned mannequins from that starts the rest of my human figures, surely for many years.