Book Image

Sculpting the Blender Way

By : Xury Greer
Book Image

Sculpting the Blender Way

By: Xury Greer

Overview of this book

Sculpting the Blender Way is a detailed step-by-step guide for creating digital art with the latest Blender 3D sculpting features. With over 400 reference images, 18 Sculpting in Action videos, and dozens of 3D sculpture example files, this book is an invaluable resource for traditional and digital sculptors looking to try their hand at sculpting in Blender. The first part of the book will teach you how to navigate Blender's user interface and familiarize yourself with the core workflows, as well as gain an understanding of how the sculpting features work, including basic sculpting, Dyntopo, the Voxel Remesher, QuadriFlow, and Multiresolution. You’ll also learn about a wide range of brushes and all of the latest additions to the sculpting feature set, such as Face Sets, Mesh Filters, and the Cloth brush. The next chapters will show you how to customize these brushes and features to create fantastic 3D sculptures that you can share with the ever-growing Blender community. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a complete understanding of the core sculpting workflows and be able to use Blender to bring your digital characters to life.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating advanced masks with Sculpt Expand

Sometimes, it's important to limit the surface area that can be affected by our brushes. One way to achieve this is through the use of Masks. We learned a little bit about this in the Using masks to add the ears and neck section of Chapter 3, Sculpting a Simple Character Head with Basic Brushes.

The latest version of Blender includes some very powerful new ways of creating masks. In particular, we're going to look at the Sculpt Expand operator to create a repeating gradient pattern.

Getting ready

Nature is full of interesting patterns that can be difficult to sculpt by hand. A wonderful example of this is the underside of a gecko's foot, which can be seen in this incredible photograph by Matt Reinbold:

Figure 6.38 – The lamellae of a gecko's foot (photo by Matt Reinbold)

There are so many intricate details here! We're going to take a stylized approach to recreating this detail...