I was going through a tutorial for sculpting human heads. We first sculpt a skull. Then you make an entirely different mesh, make it semitransparent, and then start trying to shape it over that skull and then add the rest of the facial features, etc. He’s not using Nomad but it’s easy enough to follow along with Nomad.
But it occurs to me that the hardest part of the second half of the lesson is noodling around with that shape so that it just covers the skull and then doesn’t go beneath while you’re shaping it. And that part of it seems so pointless.
What I’d like to be able to do (and I think this is a more feature with more generalized application that sculpting flesh over a skull)…
This is what I’d love to see:
I’d like to be able to make one mesh. Then I’d like to make another mesh by using the sculpting tools atop the first one. The second mesh isn’t created by adding a primitive sphere or anything. It’s just the brush strokes on the initial mesh, except that the initial mesh is inert and all the brush strokes are piling on that inert surface. You don’t have to worry about going below it. And in the end you have your skull mesh, and you have your surrounding flesh mesh, which you could say “fill interior”.
Besides being excellent for the sculpting on a skull thing, one extra bonus of this sculpting mode would be creating facial morphs for animation. With the underlying skull acting as a limit (deeper than which you couldn’t dig without turning things off), you could more easily create facial expressions that didn’t make the user say, “Why is her skull moving when she makes those expressions?”
Not sure what you’re talking about is normal sculpting practice. You don’t need a skull to sculpt a head but whatever…
To achieve what you describe……model your skull first, clone it and then continue sculpting on top of it to create your skin. You don’t need to go back to a sphere primitive.
As for the other part, there is currently no bones / facial morph system in Nomad BUT you can use layers to create morphs. Finish your head sculpt, add a layer and then pose the face into (for example) a smile expression. Drag the laye aloder back and your smile decreases. Do this for different expressions on different layers and you can mix and match the expression.
Nomad doesn’t currently have an animation system but you can export your layered model into Blender (for example) to use the layers as morph targets to animate your model.
Duplicating the skull and sculpting on the duplicate is the closest to what I’m talking about. But a moment’s reflection should be be enough to see the drawback in the workflow you’re describing. The duplicate you sculpt on is free to go below that original skull. Any time you smooth and any time you do something like clay with “sub” on, you’re potentially carving below that base.
I’m simply describing a sculpting method that’s closer to the real world activity anthropologists do when they have a skeleton and put flesh on it. It’s just an example of a broader category of sculpting that currently no program seems to let you do. Obviously we’re all aware that you can sculpt a head without doing the skull first. That’s what innumerable internet tutorials show. But whatever.
I get what you’re asking for, don’t take my reply as a mockery of brush off, we’re all friends here.
I agree that this is not currently a method in any sculpting software, although it is a current method in software with cloth simulation / physics systems - set up a collider object and the cloth drapes with physically accurate properties. That’s a calculated sim though. I’m not sure that an iPad app would give the same anthropologist sculpt vibe of putting clay on a sub skeleton. In the same way you don’t get the real feel of clay simply modelling in a sculpting app.
My suggestion of clone & work in layers is the current “standard” solution & common method. My response is based on my hope that the dev doesn’t waste his precious time implementing a system that I consider to be not required in a sculpting app. If I’m wrong then I’m wrong
Real world anthropologists have the same issue- take away too much material and they have problems just the same.
You can easily extract a shell (or multiple shells) around the underlying skull and use the shell as a “minimum thickness”. Then when you’re sculpting and hit the shell, you now know how much further you have to go until you are to the skull underneath.
As Bezzo mentioned, his (and my) suggestion is just to get you closer to the desired effect as the current app doesn’t have that feature.
