PolySculpt

During the Japan Expo tradeshow, I’ve been interviewed by Clubic, one of the main websited in france dedicated to technology. The subject was the 3D printing, from virtual to real. Then if you want to see what i’m look like, just click on the image below. Sorry, it’s all in french!

I’ve been a little bit disapointed by the intervew as I expected more about what I said about ZBrush and the sculpting part. They only kept what I said about the 3D printing aspect. But well, I won’t complain for a free advert in such website!

I hope the next one will be more focused on ZBrush!

I’m back from the japan Expo tradeshow (180 000 visitors expected!) and this edition has been a real success! If you read the french, I advise you to read the french version of this post which have more details!

This year, we had a booth shared with Sculpteo, a 3D printing company and a 3D color printer from ZCorp (Z650). It has been a good way to do presentation from virtual to real, with sculpted objects made in ZBrush and then, 3D prints!

I also learn a lot of new things related to 3D printing, which will be a great help for future productions…. and tutorials!

Our booth!

The crowd was impressive, especially on saturday, with a good mix between girls and boys (55% / 45% I think) with nice cosplay to look at :p Unfortunately, I didn’t really have a lot of time to visit the trade show as we were only two on the booth for the Pixologic side. But, well.. it’s my 5th Japan Expo, then I guess I didn’t miss something huge (perhaps a sign from Tsukasa Hojo…)

Some Cat's Eye girls

The crowd!

We also had on the booth some speed sculpting done by Bibouik, Pam / Pandorabox and Cyril, in addition to my speed sculpting and demos. I also did a comic character… a dog! with the artist beside me. I’ll do a dedicated post later as it was very interesting!

But the real crazy aspect was the printer on the booth. It has been a real magnet for visitors, to see how easy is to sculpt with ZBrush and then, how easy it was to have your own 3D models in your hands. Then it has been a good opportunity to have some of my models and speed sculpting printed! I also had my Mangalore (from the movie the Fifth Element) and Liu Lin models printed in 30cms height!!

Some sculpt-on-booth models. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo...

Liu Lin and the Mangalore. In the middle, a 15cms height robot

Hey, it's me!! Photo by Benoit Rogez from 3DVF.com

During the tradeshow, I recorded the printing process. Sorry for the poor quality and the captions are in french…

Then, it has been a very good tradeshow, a lot of cool visitors which were peased to discover ZBrush and the 3D printing, with a lot of questions. I hope to see you next year at this tradeshow!

And to finish, a short gallery. Sorry, the pictures comments are in french !

For the 5th time, I will be at Japan Expo this year, on the Pixologic booth to do live presentation of ZBrush. Japan Expo is a real large event with 180 000 visitors expected this year!

For this new edition, Pixologic decided with our partners Wacom and Sculpteo to do everything big! We are sharing the same booth to do a full presentation from 2D to “real” 3D: Create a concept in 2D on a Wacom pentablet, Sculpt it in ZBrush in 3D and then… print it directly with the help of Sculpteo! Yes, we will have a ZCorp Z650 3D color printer on our booth!

Then come and say hello at our booth, ask for help on ZBrush and if you want to demonstrate your skills, feel free to do it, even in live in front of everybody!

If you want to visit us, the tradeshow will be from July 1st to July 4th in Villepinte, in the north of Paris. We are in the booth BH 38 and if you are looking at me, ask from Thomas from Pixologic on the booth, we are three Thomas!

This is a close up of the 3D printing. It’s a small one, then some details are missing. We should have the same but in 30cms height, which will be a lot better

Retrouvez le communiqué de presse commun de Sculpteo et Pixologic dans la suite du billet.

Read more…

For the 4th time, I’ll be in the MIFA tradeshow in Annecy, south east of france, in the middle of the Alpes montains, not far from Switzerland. This professional tradeshow is one of the best one in france with a lot of nice people to meet, a lot of companies from all other the world and also schools.

During the three days, I’ll be on the Wacom booth doing ZBrush demonstrations, live improvisation and answering questions. Then, if you are around, you can come at the booth and say hello!

More about the MIFA.

I had the opportunity to discover the “new”  Cintiq 21 UX from Wacom six weeks ago at Wacom france offices. To do it very short, this is an update of the “old” Cintiq 21 UX with the technology of the Intuos 4. Then do you need to do the jump or not? that’s the purpose of this review… only available in french (translation in progress).

Then I invite you the read the french review, with the help of Google translation

This is the come back of an old model I started in… 2006! I modeled it in Hexagon 2 and started to do a sculpt in ZBrush for my first tests with this software that I was testing… I stopped to work on it as my modeling has never been done for sculpting purposes: too large polygons on the belly while too small on the face and hands.

My old computer wasn’t able to subdivide enough to sculpt some areas with a decent amount of polygons… until my co-worker Paul asked me for this model for a testing purpose. It was time to finish what I started! And no more real polygons limits now as I can push my mesh up to 26 millions of polygons

Then after few hours, I finished the model. It’s not really my original idea, but not enough time to do what I wanted to do (Beeeer is the god of the beer in fact…). Then this model could be a good test for printing purposes too (except for cutting it…)

This is the final model with its pose (which I did quickly) and some ZBrush screenshots (click to enlarge)

Here it is, the first french magazine dedicated to the 3D, and only 3D: 3DMag! This is a great news for all the french people who didn’t have magazines like 3DWorld. Now, let’s spread the news!

And oh, a short text about the Polysculpt workshop under the ZBrush 3.5 R3 news, that’s cool!

We just released a new free plugin for ZBrush today: UV Master. yes, again a free one and we hope it will help all the artist by removing one of the most complex task in the 3D production: the UVs creation.

UV Master is originally a one click button plugin to make the UV creation accessible for all the “humans” (and not for the “Aliens” ) and which producing a result understandable in a 2D editor like Photoshop, if you need to tweak or paint manually your texture in 2D.

We also add to this easy step an optional one, which name is “Control Painting”: paint areas on your model where you want to attract the UV seams created by the plugin or paint areas where you don’t want to have seams (like the face of your character). It’s just painting areas, not accurate seam. The purpose is to quickly paint these areas in few strokes!

This control painting also include a Density mode which, still through painted strokes, can change the local density of the UVs and then, allowing more or less pixels density for your textures.

I hope that you will enjoy this plugin, your feedback is welcome!

For the french speakers, the next workshop will be dedicated to 3D Printing with ZBrush: how to think about your model before creating, the rules to know, the printing constraints, the finalization and more.

The (free) registration is at the usual webpage!

This is two brushes I just made for ZBrush 3.5 R3. Click on the images to download them (Right click >> Save As).

The first one, OnTop, allow you to Sculpt, Mask or Polypaint on the top of a surface, especially a flat surface. It’s a little bit different from the Automasking >> Cavity Masking. This brush is using the brush Depth Mask with various settings. I strongly advise you to use a large brush and trying to remain on the top of the surfaces to avoid artifacts on the side of the object. A tip is to create masks, inverse the mask, blur and sharpen it twice.

This is a small video of the OnTop in action, used to create a mask.

The second one, Onborder, is a brush which work on border of small extrusions and is based on Automasking >> CavityMask.