According to the Sculptris website, it seems that the software has been acquired by Pixologic. Sculptris is a free 3D digital sculpting software. Pixologic is the maker of the popular commercial sculpting program Zbrush. Will Sculptris still be free in the future? We can only wait and see. In the meantime the software as been relabelled as Alpha 5 and is still freely available.
On the other hand, Blender has improved its 3d sculpting capability. This is evident in the newly release Blender 2.53 beta. The new sculpting panel now sports new icons and revamped interface.
The more options and alternatives, the better it is.
This article is not meant to point out which 3D program is better. It is merely to point out the difference.
Blender is free. Carrara is not but it is certainly one of the cheapest 3D program around that still pack quite a lot of features.
Of the shelf, Carrara is quite easy to get started with. Blender on the other hand has a rather steep learning curve.
Carrara has a powerful rendering system that can produce Global illumination based render. Blender on the other hand does not have global illumination capability except for ambient occlusion which is also not considered as true-blue GI system. Blender’s rendering capabilities however can be extended by external renderers such as Yafaray and Luxrender. Both programs have plugins that allow these high quality renderers to be interfaced with Blender.
Carrara comes with built-in features for the making of nature atmosphere and landscape. There is a realistic sky editor that can allow one to create nice atmospheric effects such as haze, fog and different kinds of clouds. You can possible the sun’s direction interactively with the realistic sky editor. You can also create terrains and plants using in-built generators for these objects. Blender do not includes these tools off the shelf, but an expert definitely can create them from scratch.
On the other hand, Blender has a very flexible interface that allows for customisation.
Blender has fast modelling tools. Carrara has good tools as well. But Blender seems to be faster for modelling once the hot keys are learnt.
As you can see both programs have different areas of merits.
Uncommon Paradigm is a free 3D art book with a science fiction theme. Currently it is available in the PDF ebook format.
3D graphics programs are used to create the 3D imageries. The software used include Carrara Pro, Blender, Sculptris. Carrara was used mainly for the creation of the alien sceneries. Blender and Sculptris played a fair bit in the 3d modelling work.
Carrara’s modeling features can be powerful but the interface can be tricky. This is a nice tutorial that will be covering vertex modelling using Carrara. By the way, in case you do not know, Carrara is a very affordable 3D modeling, rendering and animation software. It also sports cool tools such as terrain and plant generators.
This is a very good 3D modelling tutorial. It shows how a rope can be created using the Carrara 3D software from DAZ 3D. Carrara is a good all-around 3D application for modelling, rendering and animation. Carrara comes into a standard as well as a professional version.
