Reviewing Sculptris

Today Sculptris, a new free 3D sculpting application, had it's 1.0 release. I had been hearing some good things about it (thanks Vrav!), so I took the occasion to try it out and provide my thoughts on it. Here is the trailer showing the program in action, with my thoughts below.

Things I liked:

• Because subdivisions are handled automatically in Sculptris, you don't have to worry about extruding areas of a mesh. This means it's a great tool for trying out different ideas. I was able to get some pretty interesting results using the reverse-flatten tool.

The result of testing random tools

• Sculptris has a full texture painting suite that works very well. The brushes feel great using a tablet because of perfect support for pressure sensitivity.

• The user interface is very simple and easy to learn. I was able to pick up and learn the software in a few hours. Below is a rabbit head totem I made while testing out the software.

Production oriented test in Sculptris

• It's free!

Things I didn't like:

• Since it's an early release, there were a few minor bugs. For example, I was not able to save or load files until I deleted one of the textures that came with the software.

• Even though you can get by with less geometry than in other sculpting applications, there is still a problem with the program bogging down on more complicated models.

Initial Verdict:

I have been using Mudbox 2009 for a couple years now, and while Sculptris can't replace all the functions Mudbox has, it can replace most of them and is totally free. I would recommend this program to anyone as a useful tool for blocking out models and texture painting, and for people who don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for Mudbox or ZBrush, it is a great all-round sculpting application.