Sculptember 2020

Another September is now in the books. It was a notable month for so, so many reasons. Not the least of which is Sculptember! I participated last year, and it was so much fun I had to do it again.

The big-daddy of digital sculpting apps is ZBrush. I do own a copy of ZBrush but, frankly, it’s so unintuitive that I always forget the arcane keyboard and mouse gesture combinations required to be productive¹. So once again, I used Blender instead. And it continues to impress. It’s still a bit laggy on big scenes with a lot of polys (on my MacBook Pro, anyway). But it’s possible that might be fixed soon.

While I can get up to speed much faster in Blender than ZBrush, it still takes a good week, or so, before I feel like I’m creating stuff that’s not horrible². The primary way I can tell I’m getting back into the groove is my blockout phase goes much faster³. I find the base forms more quickly and can add a few more details before running out of time.

Usually, I gave myself two or three hours to complete a piece. Sometimes I went long. The Scrooge McDuck⁴ scene took the longest by far. But it was a Saturday, so I let myself have fun and experiment with particle systems for the coins.

Sculpts on Film

This time I recorded a few timelapse videos. You can see them all on YouTube… Where else?

For the lazy/impatient, here’s the entire playlist:

If you’re interested, I actually used Blender to edit these videos too. Blender is the Swiss Army Knife of digital content creation⁵.

I record my sessions using a bash script (see below) that captures a screenshot of my primary display once per second. From there, I import those files as an image sequence into Blender, add some royalty-free music, a post-reel image zoom animation, and voilà!

Gallery

Listed below are all 30 sculpts from September, un-altered⁶. Some are originals; the majority are pop-culture references. 80s/90s cartoons, mostly. If you can’t place one, or have any questions, hit me up in the comments or on twitter.

Enjoy!

Nerd Stuff

Here’s the bash function that captures a screenshot every N seconds:

# For macOS only, AFAIK
# (unless your OS has a `screencapture` executable that accepts the same params)
function razzi(){
  local COUNTER=1

  if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Must provide delay value (in seconds)"
  fi

  if [ $# -eq 1 ]; then
    echo "Capturing screenshots every ${1} seconds to ~/Projects/Temp/ScreenCaptures"
    while :; do
      sleep $1;
      screencapture -x -tjpg -C ~/Projects/Temp/ScreenCaptures/$(date +%y%m%d%H%M%S).jpg;
      echo "Snap! ($COUNTER)";
      let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
    done
  fi
}

And yes, I am that kind of nerd. Even when creating art, I code.