Sculptris. A Free (and Freaking Cool) 3D Sculpting Tool

You remember when you were a kid… or maybe yesterday, when you would plow your head into a clump of clay, wall, or mama’s mashed potatoes just to see the imprint? I do. Good times. I’ve grown up since then, so when there isn’t a pile of pliable material around, I sit in a chair and push pixels around on a screen using a digital sculpting tool. oh yeaah.

The latest is Sculptris. Pure, unadulterated sculpting power developed by Tomas Pettersson, himself, over a 6 month period. It’s bare-bones simple, but has all the tools you’ll need to get familiar with sculpting. On top of that… it’s free.

Sculptris is in the same vein as Blender (also free), Zbrush ($595) and modo ($995) without out all the advanced tools and other functionality. You can import and export .OBJ files, use symmetry or mask with 9 different sculpting tools and create your own brushes, materials and textures. It reminds me a lot of MoI (Moment of Inspiration) in it’s simplicity and ease-of-use – and by eas-of-use I mean, you don’t need a cheat sheet to remember all the options and commands. The few commands there are reside on top of the workspace. It is… simply beautiful. Here’s more to frighten your senses.

I’ve not had much opportunity to play around with it, but it’s UI is slick and intuitive as heck to get you started jabbin’ away at triangles immediately after download. Within 10 minutes I went from this simple sphere…

to this freaky green creature guy…

Here’s one example I came across in the forums from user quirkusmandible…

and the process he went through…

See Part 2 of the above video.

You can download Sculptris here. Try it. It’s free and a lot of fun to play around with while getting acquainted with sculpting.

Via BlenderNation