OTOY has announced the release of Sculptron, a tool that allows the user to sculpt animated meshes using GPU acceleration. This is the first commercial version and it adds a new outliner and scene graph since the alpha release.
According to OTOY this is not a competitor to existing sculpting packages like ZBrush, 3D Coat or Mudbox. Instead, it allows the user to import an existing OBJ file and then sculpt on them, storing keyframes along the way. OBJ sequences can be loaded as well, making it a useful tool for correcting existing animations.
Finished animations can be exported to MDD (with Alembic support arriving soon), but animated meshes can also be converted to OpenVDB sequences. At present, it is only possible to use the mesh to define the domain shape, but in future releases, it will be possible to edit absorption, scattering, emission and also custom volumetric channels directly in Sculptron. The same procedural textures that can be used for mesh sculpting can also be used as SDF and Volumetric Noises to “displace” the volume and define the volume opacity.
Find out more on and download the free Alpha release from the OTOY forum.
Nice to see !
Indeed if it works only on GPU, it will never be a ZBrush competitor but only a cfx tool.
Would be great if it targeted also ZBrush users with a very very high polycount cpu option.
Also the UI is weird, is it a curse of sculpting softwares or what ?
Interesting. But the UI sure is weird.
Have you ever seen the UI of Zbrush?? 😉
Yeah. Seem many want to recreate the wheel.
UI could be worse, let’s see if they release more than one version (like Chronosculpt)…
It’s ImGUI – a great Immediate Mode GUI. I use it myself for app coding. Great stuff. You do not create predefined views like in most other UI kits. UI is totally flexible.
Yesss! ImGUI, I knew it. Almost all developments in Microsoft, GameUIs in Ubisoft, Sony etc are using ImGui. This is huge, free, and it is coming.
Artists got so used to QT default interface, every and each 3D software looks meanwhile almost identical. ImGui is damn fast (GUI-look can be done better but this is not so important because it is fast and sensitive. When I see those sick slider of Substance or ZBrush, where I do not know how to type in or control them, this is a dream.)
This is nice, as other comments say, let’s see how much support it gets. Mush3D didn’t get beyond an initial release…
I am also really looking forward to seeing other DCCs do something like this (blender, I am looking at you!). Sculpting on caches would be amazing.