Creative Chill
Here's the latest vibe from the guys at Music Lab, inspired by Diablo and always the right level of creativity to elevate your day/night of work, study and chill. Hope you enjoy as I brief you guys on what I've learned today using Blender for sculpting...
Comparison to Low-Poly
To the right is one of the later character heads that I completed last night using a low-poly mesh and manipulating individual vertices (points) and edges on the surface. This technique felt very artificial to me right from the beginning as it's not like traditional sculpting in any way. Most people don't know this, but I actually spent some time ages ago studying fine art (painting, sculpture, drawing, etc).
And so when I tried the sculpting tools in Blender, it straight away felt more natural. It mimics the traditional techniques used with clay and you basically manipulate the surface as if it were a clay work. The toolset is extensive in Blender, but I also found out that compared to a program like Z-Brush (more of an industry standard), Blender would be considered capable of lower-res results since it can only handle about 5-10% of the total poly counts (faces of the mesh). I got this advice today from a real pro with immense talent and loads of experience in the industry.
Moving Forward
For my application, and the things I use Blender for, there is no need to change over to another program since I'm not trying to achieve ultra-realism in my work and only really dealing with simple geometry in most cases. And as you might have noticed with the cube animation, Blender can produce quite adequate rendering results, with really good material and shader effects more generally. However if you are considering learning character development as part of a career path, then I would probably start out with something like Z-Brush if you can. Unlike Blender, Z-Brush is one you'd have to purchase, but being an industry standard, you might just have to invest in it if you want to work professionally (there may be a student edition, not really sure).
Catch up with you a little later after some coding progress.
Stay awesome,
EMH