Dear all,
We are excited to bring you a new release of Sculptron!
As with all experimental builds, please do not use this for production purposes. We can't guarantee that scenes saved with this version will be compatible in future releases, and we anticipate there being several maintenance releases. Workflow and available tools will be improved, so expect small and big changes in future releases.
What is Sculptron?
Sculptron is a GPU based sculpt-animate application.
Sculptron primary target is to provide artists with a powerful sculpting tool conceived to work with 3D animation. It's not a replacement for ZBrush or any similar specialized sculpting applications you can use to edit static models. Sculptron Alpha 3 introduces sculpting into your animation workflow, along with a set of new deformers and animation capabilities.
Sculptron Alpha 3
Sculptron has been deeply re-engineered to enhance the possibility of implementing a wide range of important features, with the scope of making it a powerful and very specialized cache editing and 3D animation system.
Performances.
When we come to animated deformations, Sculptron shows some incredible performances hardly matched by any other currently available 3D animation software.
By the way, despite its name, Sculptron is not just a sculpting software and should not be compared to specialized Sculpting applications like ZBrush or Mudbox: it’s definitely focused on Animated Sculpting and deformation. Being able to animate a huge amount of polygons (like a character composed by 500k pure - not subpatched - polygons can be) has been our target since the start. We’re always looking for new ways to optimize performances and we’ll never stop doing it, but I’m sure any 3D artist will find in this version some unprecedented deformation speed, especially when combining animated Sculpt Layers and Effects.
A new Outliner (in Alpha 2 we only had a very simple Item List) has been introduced and it’s the core of scene management in Sculptron.
It’s now possible to select (and multi-select) item(s), parent them and change their order in the list.
Clicking with the Right mouse button on any item will bring up additional options (Delete, Hierarchy selection, Collapse/Expand Hierarchy).
The Outliner is also the place where the Modifier Stack lives and can be managed.
You can “parent” effects and Sculpt Layers to it, change order and see the resulting mesh deformation in real time.
It’s now possible to animate Item Transformations and any Attribute in the scene (Alpha 2 only allowed for animated sculpting).
It is possible to animate any properties showing the curve icon. Activating it will create an editable animation track.
In this case clicking on the curve icon relative to the Morph attribute enables animation for the Sculpt Layer:
In this new version we introduced a very powerful Modifier Stack with full Order of Operation support.
The new modifier stack allows artists to combine multiple deformers in sequence and see the final result in real time on the deformed mesh. It’s now possible to combine MDD caches (even multiple ones), Sculpt Layers and Linear Deformers, plus a number of very powerful modifiers like the Transform Effect. The number of available deformers is going to get bigger and bigger moving forward.
The new Environment Item allows an HDRI image to be used for OpenGL PBR lighting and reflections.
The Environment Item also offers several options to customize the background image.
In addition to the already available Matcaps, we introduced a new PBR Material with UV texturing support, supporting PBR environment lighting and reflections
The new Volume Item can convert any static or animated mesh into a VDB volume, which can then be exported as a frame or a sequence.
Volumetric Noise:
We’ve introduced the concept of Camera. As everything in this new version of Sculptron, it can be animated.
Customizable Null Objects
We added Null Objects that can be used for the Scene setup (grouping items, as reference for deformers and so on). We added several shapes and options for full customization.
We added some high poly primitives that can be added to the scene from the Starter Objects menu.
Navigation
- Alt+ Left Mouse button drag = Rotate View
ALT + Middle Mouse button drag = Pan View
ALT + Right Mouse button drag = Zoom View
CTRL = invert brush function when available
SHIFT = Smooth Brush
CTRL when using Grab = Constraint along normal
f = Fit World
SHIFT+f = Fit Selected
- Left Mouse/Pen button drag in an empty area = Rotate View
Middle Mouse/Pen button drag in an empty area = Pan View
Right Mouse/Pen button drag in an empty area = Zoom View
- q = Selection Mode
w = Translate
e = Rotate
r = Scale
s = Sculpt
CTRL+z = Undo
CTRL+y = Redo
Known Issues
- - Please be sure to have a material assigned to the object or it will not be visible in the viewport
- Undo is performed on a per attribute basis right now, which means that moving/rotating/resizing the object in the viewport will require 3 undo actions, one per Transform channel
- Textured Sculpting has not been implemented yet in this new build
- Create Frame option on the Right Mouse button doesn't work when used in the timeline
- The Transform Gizmo is only available for translation right now, but it's still possible to rotate and scale items in the viewport
- Deformers are not yet "unified"; some offers better visualization and mode options than others
- After getting back to Sculptron from another app, it may happen to be stuck in navigation mode; pressing Alt solves the issue
It's alpha software, expect some crashes and please report any bug you may find!
Watch the Sculptron Alpha 3 Presentation Video:
Sculptron Alpha 3 Presentation Video
Watch the Sculptron Alpha 3 Intro Video:
Sculptron Alpha 3 Intro Video
Download Sculptron Alpha 3:
Sculptron Alpha 3
